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.

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

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

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.