Quote

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

I was a kitchen porter for an hour at the Bank of England when I was 18. In the cafe, someone clicked their fingers and shouted, 'Boy, come and clear my table.' I walked out.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

I so desperately wanted to be Mr. Somebody. Instead, I was the little brother, included to a point.

He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'

I was waiting for a train at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. My knee was hurting, so I asked a young man for his seat. He replied, 'There's one over there'. I said, 'Please', and when he refused I poured my water over him.

When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.