if you think you know, you don't ask questions, or if you ask, you don't listen to the answers. Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You - you have to grope.

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

Drink very good tea out of a thin Wocester cup of colour between apricot and pink.

I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate-or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my 'ten minutes'. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.

For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.