My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said, 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well.

I confess I've never felt like a passenger.

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

There is a magic in some books / That sucks a man into connections / With the spirits hard to touch / That join him to his kind.

All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.

I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.

Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today. But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away.