“I always woke up before the plane landed.”

If poisons were ponies, I’d put my money on cyanide.

Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

Except I’m aware that as a writer you can’t get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults.

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.

One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

Whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

To be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren’s hands.

I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material – something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal.

And I had long ago become accustomed to being called ‘Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime.

There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

Students, when you want to say something, think about it three times before you say it. Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others. Do not speak if it brings no benefit.

A farmer’s horse is never lame, never unfit to go. Never throws out curbs, never breaks down before or behind.

Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.

How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.

We are deliberately putting a world order before our loyalty to our own country.