I met Bill Clinton in 1977 while I was working as a news reporter for KARK-TV in Little Rock Arkansas. Shortly after we met we began a sexual relationship that lasted for twelve years.

The cinema began with a passionate physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it manipulated it and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

I mean I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

As they say one thing led to another and ultimately the British and Irish governments asked me to serve as chairman of the peace negotiations which ironically began six years ago this week.

The rain began again. It fell heavily easily with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature which was to fall and fall.

But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians who are imprisoned behind these bars music's got these bars and measures you know.