He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.