“I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it’s the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It’s usually below the surface. It doesn’t appear to tackle problems at a personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.

