We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.