There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.