It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

Everything has been something before.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.

Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.

As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.

Botswana is actually very peaceful. It's democratic. It never was in debt. They've been fortunate, they've had diamonds.