Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

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.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

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.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise