As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead mercury secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

I'd say that after my father passed my writing changed it went deeper. Most would say 'matured' but I don't think I'd use that word in relation to my progress. I think 'change' is a little more accurate.

To exist is to change to change is to mature to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

I don't think people change. I think they definitely mature. But I think the essence of what I am today is the same as when I was five years old. It's just maturity. I've become a healthier fuller expression of that essence.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change mature and become more nuanced whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.