And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

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

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.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

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.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.