I've never sent an email to anybody. I believe in keeping the postman in work.
I always work on the principle that if my heart and my head are together on an issue, write it, say it.
I'm not going to be putting my expenses on the Internet. I wouldn't know how.
The personality cult of the ego does not work down a coal mine and it does not work in the Labour party.
I did marathons long before they were popular, when people running round the streets were looked at oddly.
I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford.
You don't enter politics when you come to parliament. I was getting politics for breakfast, dinner and tea when I was a little kid.
Parties are organised happiness but happiness is accidental. You can't legislate for it.
I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.
I worked in the pit for more than 20 years and never had a serious injury.
I don't believe in organised happiness.
I remember arguing with kids on the street who were talking about Santa Claus. I said don't be so daft - Santa Claus doesn't come down our chimney. He's an economic Santa Claus; he goes down chimneys where they've got money.
Cameron called me a dinosaur you know? Well I'm the only dinosaur who can ride a bike 12 miles a day.
I was cycling until I was 68. I used to play football, cricket, tennis, table tennis. I was into road walking - heel and toe.
We're allowed to say wonderful things about the Royal Family in the House of Commons. What you're not allowed to say is: anything that might be truthful, but that might upset them. So from time to time I've been pulled up because I've said things which I think are important.
I do rely on my instincts a lot and my imagination.
I never, ever romanticise life in the pit. It was a hard, dirty, noisy, tiring, dangerous job in a confined space, a very dark world with no toilets or running water to drink or wash with.
I refused to pair with a Tory MP, I refused all foreign junkets and I've never had a drink in a Westminster bar.
I hate to say it because I voted against everything Thatcher did, but she had principles she believed in.
I realised that you could get into trouble with a dull speech.
