The World Is Not Real For Me

All I Wanted Was To Be Left Alone. They Abhor A Vacuum, Other People. You Find A Quiet Corner Where You Can Hunker Down In Peace, And The Next Minute There They Are, Crowding Around You In Their Party Hats, Tooting Their Paper Whistles In Your Face And Insisting You Get Up And Join In The Knees-up.

Most Crime Fiction, No Matter How 'hard-boiled' Or Bloodily Forensic, Is Essentially Sentimental, For Most Crime Writers Are Disappointed Romantics.

Happiness Was Different In Childhood. It Was So Much Then A Matter Simply Of Accumulation, Of Taking Things - New Experiences, New Emotions - And Applying Them Like So Many Polished Tiles To What Would Someday Be The Marvellously Finished Pavilion Of The Self.

The Telephone Ringing Gave Me A Dreadful Start. I Have Never Got Used To This Machine, The Way It Crouches So Malevolently, Ready To Start Clamouring For Attention When You Least Expect It, Like A Mad Baby.

What I Was Afraid Of Was My Own Grief, The Weight Of It, The Ineluctable Corrosive Force Of It, And The Stark Awareness I Had Of Being, For The First Time In My Life, Entirely Alone, A Crusoe Shipwrecked And Stranded In The Limitless Wastes Of A Boundless And Indifferent Ocean.