Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

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.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.