I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper. - William Golding

..And then — that personal, that wholly isolated direction at the back of your head, that black place from which you looked out on things so that all of those people, even Toni, out there — how could the creature called Sophy who sat there at the mouth of the tunnel behind her belong to anyone but herself? It was all silly. <..> You could choose to belong to people the way the Goodchilds and Bells and Mrs Hugeson did by being good, by doing what they said was right. Or you could choose what was real and what you knew was real — your own self sitting inside with its own wishes and rules at the mouth of the tunnel.

"I'm scared of him," said Piggy, "and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again; it's like asthma an' you can't breathe..."

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.