My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years... I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.

Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.