“I was scared of the Bible – it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus’s disciples and I used to show them modern life – how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn’t change my feelings about the Bible jinx.”

When I was really young I used to collect frog spawn. I made a pond out of an old sink and I loved to spend hours watching the frogs grow.

Therapy is like telling your nightmares when you’re a kid; they lose their power to hurt and control.

I’d say my greatest fear is fear itself.

Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.

Even when I haven’t had money, I found money to travel. It’s a luxury that’s a kind of necessity, I think.

I get told I’m a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word “confessional”. I don’t like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don’t want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I’m letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings’ records.

I love the water more than anything. I’m not very good at sunbathing – I get really bored. I love swimming and I love being like a fish and getting in the sea and just – I don’t know, it feels right.

I’m not comfortable holidaying in other people’s poverty.

My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.

When I’m on a roll nothing makes me happier or feel more satisfied, like plugging in, life makes sense.

Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don’t stop off on the way somewhere else – it’s an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it’s an effort.

I don’t read music; I taught myself guitar.

One time I completely thought I’d turned into a werewolf and was sure I could see hairs sprouting from my face. At those times I’d suddenly go very quiet and not talk to anyone, stunned from the developments, being a werewolf and all.

Don’t say God is silent when your Bible is closed. Open it and read it. God will speak.

The Bible is proved to be a revelation from God, by the reasonableness and holiness of its precepts

It is impossible, Bible in hand, to limit Christ’s Church to one’s own little community.

To which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to Go

In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.

Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!

Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

As to women, the Islamic faith has given women rights that are equal to or more than the rights given them in the Old Testament and the Bible.