The writer, particularly the writer of fiction, is different from the storyteller … The storyteller lives in the real world: she has a life, as the current locution would have it. But the writer has two lives. He, or more probably she, is the hapless character who goes to the supermarket, performs domestic tasks, and is invariably worsted in arguments, and that other one … the cold logician who observes a beginning, a middle and an end, who determines causality, although subject, like everyone else, to the irrationality of circumstance. […] I am convinced that writing is a displacement activity that gives one the illusion of an honest day's work. That may be its main function, but it is set in train by a different psychic arrangement. The strange organic process by which a body of written work is achieved has less to do with will than with wish. What that wish may be is rooted in the personal history of a writer, and is paradoxically known but also secret. But if wish —...
'I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.'