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It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.

If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.