Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.

I still had the sensation I was playing a role but it didn’t bother me any more, because I knew now that everybody else played a role too; it was just that some played them well and some badly.

I don’t think you have any control over who you are-it just happens. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and don’t know who I am. I have to get out of bed and open the closet door, and then I think, oh yes, I’m the girl in the red dress.

The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn’t talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn’t quite as stupid and pointless.

What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there.

I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will.

The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless.

The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities.

But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom.

I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics.