I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.

This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.