Writers should provoke disagreement.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.