When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period… - Wide Sargasso Sea

(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another.

I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)

He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed.
'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)...