I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested but I went into a diversion programme and by that time I'd already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.

My therapist says I still haven't got in touch with my anger. Maybe one day I'm going to explode. But I'm still really happy. I know it looks like a strange and painful upbringing - all those experiences led me to the paths that I'm on now.

What I needed most was to love and to be loved eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me and sure enough I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy by suspicions and fear by burst of anger and quarrels.

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful but I've seen quite a few deaths and with one exception I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

At that time I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well if it was painful to read it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.

If you're extremely painfully frightened of age it shows.