I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.