I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

Be unwilling to lose.

When you are a mother you are never really alone in your thoughts ... A mother has to think twice once for herself and once for her child.

If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.

A beneficent person is like a fountain watering the earth, and spreading fertility; it is, therefore, more delightful to give than to receive.

Every storm runs out of rain, just like every dark night turns into day.

You just have to press the right keys and the right pedals at the right time and the music plays itself.

I have an old saying that the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Cuban cigars is a big expense because I do smoke a lot of them, eight to 12 a day, so that would be almost as bad as a cocaine habit, a hundred bucks a day.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

It's nice we work in a place where you're allowed to keep coming back to have new experiences together.