I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

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.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

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.

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.