I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.