“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.”

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books.

Whenever I’m out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think.

During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people’s creations.

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

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.

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.

Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

My hats did give me an identity. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time someone has seen me bareheaded and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognize you without a hat on’, I could have bought the Cowboys myself.

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

I was brought up as a physicist.

It’s much more casual than it was, but my clothes and my ring attire – I thought up half of what I brought to the show.

We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

It is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.