As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

I'd have to struggle to find a subject in which I can't get some kind of interested pulse started.

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books.

Every pain is a lesson.

Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.

Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.