I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?