Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

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.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.