It is important not to trust people too much.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

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 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 am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

The writer is all alone.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.