You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

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

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.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.