Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.