The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 139

If there was a place, at this stage of my career, where I could
fittingly celebrate my freedom, the fact that I had made myself a writer and
could now live as a writer, it was here, on this island which had fed my panic
and my ambition, and nurtured my earliest fantasies. And just as, in 1956, at
that first return, I had moved from place to place, to see it shrink from the
place I had known in my childhood and adolescence, so now I moved from place to
place to touch it with my mood of celebration, to remove from it the terror I
had felt in these places for various reasons at different times. Far away, in
England, I had re-created this landscape in my books. The landscape of the books
was not as accurate or full as I had pretended it was; but now I cherished the
original, because of that act of creation.