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

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

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.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

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.