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

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.