“I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing”

“I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”

“And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the ‘personality’ doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it.”

“I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate”

“I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.”

“I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.”