I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.

I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.