Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself.

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.