True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Your fear of becoming a cliche is what turns you into one. If you remove the fear, we are all really walking contradictions, hypocrites and paradoxical cliches

What good is faith if it causes pain for another? What good is religion if it does no good? What good is any belief that leads to hate?

I play a musical instrument a little, but only for my own amazement.

I was born and brought up in Liverpool with my clever little sister Jemma, who is 14 and wants to be a vet. My mum Jane is an administrator and my dad Peter is a taxi driver.

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

I'm comfortable in my own skin. I know I'm not going to ever be Cindy Crawford or Elle MacPherson.

Hammer and tongs! I am so torn between rage and joy, that if I do not burst, it will be a marvel!

Life is supposed to be lived for God and for others.

On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Prayer is nothing but the breathing that out before the Lord, that was first breathed into us by the Spirit of the Lord.