the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

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?

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.

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

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun.