If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved.

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

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.