"A writer’s life is all anxiety and ambition —and ambition, here, is not readily distinguishable from anxiety; it is part of your desire to do right by what talent you have. So some of us will be wanting a break from that, if we can manageably get it. In the Preface to his Memoirs, Kingsley observes: ‘I have already written an account of myself, in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels’. These novels are ‘firmly unautobiographical, but at the same time, every word of them says something about the kind of person I am. “In vino veritas — I don’t know,” Anthony Powell once said to me, “but in scribendo veritas — a certainty.”’ And that’s another connection. In vino and in scribendo alike, the conscious mind steps back and the unconscious mind steps forward. They both need a change of scene."

Experience, Martin Amis