The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story, and the methods are mythological by nature.

At the meeting I gave close attention to the six members without ever actually studying them with my eyes. I always preferred what I saw out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak.

One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.

I said, ‘Dottie’s sort of the general reader in my mind.’
‘Fuck the general reader,’ Solly said, ‘because in fact the general reader doesn’t exist.’
‘That’s what I say,’ Edwina yelled. ‘Just fuck the general reader. No such person.’
I liked to be lucid. So long as Dottie took in what I wrote I didn’t care whether she disapproved or not.

I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

I was finding it extraordinary how throughout the period I had been working on the novel, right from Chapter One, characters and situations, images and phrases that I absolutely needed for the book simply appeared as if from nowhere into my range of perception.