I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.