I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'

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.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

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

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.