“I love that book, [but] if I’m honest, it isn’t the brilliance of the writing, or the brilliance of the story, although there is brilliance in both of those things. It was pure and simply… I’d gone right through school, never once imagining that books could be about us, about people like us. And then I stumbled across this book when I’m fifteen or sixteen, and suddenly I’m reading a book which feels like it’s about my people; it’s about my grandfather; it’s about people who work on the land…

One of the books I read immediately after that was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, which is still one of my favorite books. It had the same effect on me. I read the story of the boy who loves the old fisherman, the beauty of that relationship and the admiration he has for that old man when everybody else doubts him. [I thought], ‘I want to write a book like The Old Man and the Sea, but about my grandfather as a shepherd.’ Took me about 25 years to pull that off, but that’s really where the idea of my book came from.”

“You know, Brian Eno is not really a ‘route.’ That’s like saying to a painter, did you ever think of going the Leonardo da Vinci route? You know, design helicopters and drum machines, and paint the Mona Lisa? Eno is really a law unto himself. He’s extraordinary both as a producer and as a solo artist, to have produced megahits by U2 and Coldplay but also to have invented ambient music and all the installations he’s done and so on… it’s really extraordinary. I would be flattered to follow in those footsteps. But I don’t think that’s a route you can pick…

You know, when Eno puts out a solo record, you don’t check to see where it got to in the Billboard charts, or how many copies it sold, or whether it’s getting much radio play. You just sort of assume that it’s going to be something that is just there, it’s out, available. It will be influential, but it’s not really going to make a mark on the mainstream. And I suppose I was too chicken to do that. I didn’t like the idea of a world in which my stuff would not even scratch the surface of the mainstream, because I do have the ability to do that and to make records like that. So I wasn’t ready to completely give up on that.”