There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?

Genuinely good people are like that. The sun shines out of them. They warm you right through.

My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

Often it's the latest novel that I've written that is my favourite. I'd been dreaming it for so long, living and breathing its story so that when it finally arrives as a newly published book, smelling wonderful and fresh out of the box, there is nothing like it.

I don't want to be separate from something that's important to me.