I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

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.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.