The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.