QUOTE : All I know is that I felt, inexplicably, unlucky, cursed in some way that would not be immediately apparent to anyone without a job or a lover or a family. I knew myself to be doomed to a life of dissatisfactions: my talents, whatever they were, would go permanently unrecognised, my relationships wrecked by circumstances entirely beyond my control. And because I knew this beyond any doubt, then there was simply no point in attempting to rectify the situation by looking for work that would stimulate me, or for a personal life that would make me happy. So I stopped writing (because if you are born under a bad sign, as I had been, there is simply no point in persisting with something that will inevitably bring with it only the humiliation of perpetual rejection), and involved myself in as many miserable and debilitating triangular relationships as I possibly could, and settled down to the remainder of my allotted three-score years and ten of unrelieved and terrible nothingness.