You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Things are not what they seem.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.

A great father is one whose children look up to him rather than away from him.

Surround yourself with love.

Life is what you make of it, unless you have tourette's, in which case much becomes involuntary.

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

We really don't have a policy [on climate change]. There's a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of action.

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

If you can find a company that can get away with raising prices year after year without losing customers (an addictive product such as cigarettes fills the bill), you've got a terrific investment.

I hope that my niece in 20 years is going to say to me, 'Aunt Stevie, what was with your hair?'

We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.