I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

I was surprised. He came in, he closed the door. ... It became pretty apparent once he started (talking) that he was heading down that path.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.