“Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility.”

“And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.”

“Sometimes the heart demands.”

“I regret, most of all, my shrivelled heart. So focused on the numbers. On the maths of my personal equation. Can a man change his heart? Are there ways to improve the spirit of who you are? Of why ...”

“The writers themselves … they were pitifully out of context. So self-assured, so assuming, so completely wrong. Unable – any of them – to imagine what might be coming.”

“Control is an advertising concept.”

“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

“The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a sup...”

“More than the disappearing trees and roses, its the human tendency to suppress the Natural Voice of the Natures Man which is sorrowful.”

“The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.”

“Courage without conscience is a wild beast.”

“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”