My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.