As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.