One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

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.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.