“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

I want my words to survive translation.

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

Stop blaming outside circumstances for your inside chaos.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;!

The Lord looks on his servants with pity and not with blame. In God’s sight we do not fall; in our sight, we do not stand. Both of these are true, but the deeper insight belongs to God.

You can’t blame her for drifting away when you never asked her ship to stay. – abandonment ship.

Not by blaming the world, not by shunning the world, but only be loving the world can I have peace of mind.

Do not Blame the world. Find a solution.

Men, when their actions succeed not as they would, are always ready to impute the blame thereof to heaven, so as to excuse their own follies.

I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being – to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame.