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.

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

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.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

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.

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