I tell you, my friends,’ he said one day. ‘I tell you that I am the only sane man in the regiment. It’s the others that are mad, but they don’t know it. They fight a war and they don’t know what for. Isn’t that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language? And it’s me they call mad!

I'm still not sure I want to be a writer. I think of myself as a storyteller more.

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?

It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.

He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.

It's the teacher that makes the difference, not the classroom.

One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.