Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, and clever.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

We have to learn everything we do.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.