I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

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

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.

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

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.