“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.”

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor.

I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

In 1967, I had my first black girlfriend, and a lot more ever since then. I just don’t understand racism.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

The big problems are where people don’t realise they have one in the first place.

My last race was at Le Mans in 2000, my first race was in 1959, so I dodged a lot of bullets along the way, I can tell you that.

I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but of course I believe in two people having chemistry right away.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961.