I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

The writer is all alone.

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.