A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.
When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
