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

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

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