“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”

We are the storytelling animal.

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

I love fatherhood. I could bang on about kids forever.

I loved my baby dolls when I was a kid. I used to pray with them and say good night to each and every one of them because I didn’t want their feelings to get hurt. I remember having that connection with my baby dolls.

I will not allow myself to lose the child in me.

A childlike mind in its simplicity practises that science of good to which the wise may be blind.

I was an ambitious child and I tended to be scatterbrained. If I was at school and saw a bird outside the window I wanted to follow it. I was adventurous.

I like watching film, I go to the cinema, but a lot of times I go to see kids’ films.

I gave you seven children, but now you want to give them back.

We forget that our parents were children, too. Let’s get to know them as little ones. Perhaps we’ll find the answer why they behave now the way they do.