My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.