The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.