I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.