In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.

For me, church was about not only religion but about community. A woman in my grandmother's church helped pay for my SAT classes when I was in high school and drove me there every week.

The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.

The earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow, No separate life they never can know. They're soul and body, hand and heart, What God hath joined, let no man part.