Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.

I try to not think of those things that we cannot control, but I think if we continue to work with positive attitudes, conditions will be better for more people.

For the last few weeks, I've been completely happy. I've got my next PSA in three weeks' time. It may well show my PSA is starting to go up, and the cancer's coming back. Totally to my surprise, I've acquired this sort of Buddhist Zen outlook. Well, the future doesn't exist. I'm well. I'm happy at the moment. I've had a wonderful, exciting life. I've made lots of mistakes. I've trampled on people - yak, yak, yak, as I discuss in my books. But at the moment, today, the sun is shining. I'm very well. It's not that I'm in denial, but I think, well, all right. It may be bad news in three weeks' time, but that's three weeks away. At the moment, I'm well.

Dream. Dream. Dream. Be like God, dream because God believes in you young people. Most of God’s best collaborators and partners have been young people. Joseph, David, Jeremiah, St. Francis. They are young, young, young. And in many ways Jesus was young. Many of those who have been God’s best works — fellow workers have been young. And don’t allow oldies to fill you with their cynicism and disillusionment. Dream. Dream that this world can become better as you do dream, in fact. I mean, when these young people go off and work as Peace Corps and other volunteering groups in poverty stricken places where they don’t get any better headlines for dreaming the good things. Dream. Dream. Dream. Dream that this can be a world without poverty. Dream that this can be a world without war. Dream that this is a world that will recognize that every human being matters.

What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized.

I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think — I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn’t know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn’t know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn’t know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense — this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.

I sent off the letter. I probably made a technical mistake by giving it to a journalist before hearing from the Prime Minister because this journalist was working for a Sunday newspaper and gave it enormous press, and I think quite rightly the Prime Minister was annoyed that I had not given him the opportunity but never mind.

Ultimately, it’s a man who was teaching us English Literature in what we call matricula, the last 2 years of high school. He really was quite extraordinary. When he spoke of a Shakespearean play, you almost thought that he grew up with Shakespeare! He was very good, yes. A black guy who was fantastic and gave us a deep love for literature.

There will always be so many who might say, “Ah, he’s a politician masquerading as an archbishop.” Politics is so all-pervasive, and in my theology, obviously, all of life belongs to God, and you don’t have compartments, this is your economic life, this is your political life, this is your religious life. Religion encompasses all of those. But yes, I wouldn’t myself have said I was setting out to be a political animal.