“Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!”

A life is made up of a great number of small incidents, and a small number of great ones.

Obscurity is never a virtue.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

Careful those who fight with monsters, that they might become monsters themeselves.

f I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead.

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

It is preferable to incur a mild punishment than to perform an onerous task.

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you.

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.

I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations – that’s why we got married really quickly.

It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work.

I unfortunately don’t speak French, but my wife is now fluent in English, which really reflects rather badly on me.

The German word ‘will’ is the English word ‘want,’ so that’s a little bit of the problem.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

The English game is not faster than the German game.

I’m really good at math and history, but I suck in English.