My family are comfortable. We're enjoying life in Manchester and here at the club. The people have been great with me, with my family. We're happy and very grateful.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
I've always said that God will somehow enlighten me.
Iβm the first person to shamelessly admit that I donβt know it all. With that said, my attitude is if such that if I donβt know something I want you to enlighten and inform me so we can grown and get somewhere together - even if that means we ultimately agree to disagree.
I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.
Maybe one of you can enlighten me, but I just don't understand why it is so hard to be kind to one another?
It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.
The film 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,' based the book of the same name, has a line that enlightens and comforts me. The protagonist, who has lost all ability to move except one eye, discusses his role as a father. He notes, 'Even a fraction of a father is still a father.'
I was a good soldier in the British Army. I was born in a very, very poor family. And I enlisted to escape hunger. But my officers were Scottish and they loved me. The Scots are good, you know.
I enlisted when I was a boy. The Navy looked after me like my mother. It fed me, took care of me and gave me wonderful opportunities.
Could I anticipate the enmity of those for whom I encountered such opposition? If they had been willing, I should have gained the victory. But the head faints when it is abandoned by the other members. If they had been wise they would have seen that in attacking me they were attacking their own privileges and serving princes to their own servitude.
I was right to back Muhammad Ali, but it caused me major enmity in many areas of this nation.
One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
I sit there pouring out my woes year after year, coming up with one enormity after another about my mother and the way she let me down; but it doesn't make me any the less fearful.
Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.
I found myself in a meeting on my 13th birthday, which I really had no idea the enormity of, but I was in a meeting with the CEO of Atlantic Records, who sort of signed me right then and there as I was playing guitar for him.
That result at the French was a big break for me. I had been playing quite well up until that point but nobody really expected me to do well on clay - it was my worst surface. I had had some success on the clay but I was a set and a break up in the semi-final against Jausovec and maybe the enormity of the occasion got to me.
When it's time for me to walk away from something, I walk away from it. My mind, my body, my conscience tell me that enough is enough.
Everywhere I look, someone is telling me, 'You're not good enough,' or, 'You can't do this or that.' You can only hear that so many times before enough is enough.
