All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The writer is all alone.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.