Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Every situation is a spiritual journey.

Praying is the purest pleasure.

You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.

The one who sees thought as a thought is the witness to mind and no longer subject to suffering.

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

I love playing live now more than ever. I enjoy it, I think it keeps you young.

Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

I don't really hang out with anyone. I'll hang out with my band ... but I don't have any friends aside from that.

I was surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word peace