I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.

I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.

It's lovely. I hate it.

Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction.

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

If you run away from trouble, it always follows.' Rather my impression, too. Though that never stopped me trying.

What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.