Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

The only selfish life is a timid one.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?