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

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

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.

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.

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

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.