That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.