“Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”

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.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

I leave my circle tight and keep my family close.

Wherever Jesus may lead us, He goes before us. If we don’t know where we are going, we know with whom we go.

In the past a leader was a boss. Today’s leaders must be partners with their people. They no longer can lead solely based on positional power.

If we want people on the front lines of companies to be responsible for making good business decisions, they must have the same information that managers use to make good business decisions.

I am not a private person; you can ask those who hang out with me.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

May your love never end and if you need a friend. There’s a seat along side me.

Always surround yourself with people who are even more talented and competent than you.