“One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.”

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

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

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The writer is all alone.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.