On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

To me writing was not a career but a necessity. And so it remains, though I am now, technically, a professional writer. The strength of this inborn desire to write has always baffled me. It is understandable that the really gifted should feel an overwhelming urge to use their gift; but a strong urge with only a slight gift seems almost a genetic mistake.

Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country - the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life.