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

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

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

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