The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.