Writers should provoke disagreement.

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

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

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.

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

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.