The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.

I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

There's nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

Will ye be wantin’ this now, madam?”“Yes, please, ” she whispered. She wanted to engrave the sight of him thus, about to make love to her, in her mind.

Be thankful.Be grateful.

It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

I should clarify that anyone that goes onstage and makes strangers laugh is insane. So I am insane.

Love grants in a moment what toil can hardly acheive in an age.

Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.

The theme, or harmony, of a painting can be created by any one of its visual elements. A single colour... repetition of shapes... Light can be a theme.

If they can shut down ABC News and ABC network programming just because they don't agree on something, it makes you wonder

There’s nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms.