...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.[It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses.

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.