We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

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.

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

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.