I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.