“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”

I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself.

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Thank goodness my education was neglected.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

I am worn to a raveling.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific’.

I fear that we shall be obliged to leave this pudding

When gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left onto the cat’s plate.

I do so hate finishing books. I would like to go on with them for years.

For quiet, solitary and observant children create their own world and live in it, nourishing their imaginations on the material at hand.

Once upon a time there were three kittens, and their names were Mitten, Tom Kitten, and Moppet. They had dear little fur coats of their own; and they tumbled about the doorstep and played in the dust.

The man who pauses on the paths of treason, Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.

That’s already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.

My first attempt at real music was when I was 13. My first signed band was when I was 21; that failed. I got another deal at 26; that failed, and then I was broke.

Sometimes to heal, you must first get hurt.

Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.

If at first you don’t succeed. You can dust it off and try again. Dust yourself off and try again.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked up on as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?