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.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.