Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.