How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

The world is always in movement.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.