All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.

I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.