When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

We are creatures of story.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me