At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.