“Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”

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 profoundly cynical premise of all religionists is that people are not capable of behaving decently toward one another unless they are lured with promises of pie in the sky and simultaneously terrorized by the threats of extreme nastiness in the eternal afterlife in hell.

I got a fan letter on the back of a prison menu. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, they get pie. It’s not so bad. They get pie on the weekends.’ I want to say blueberry and also a Boston cream pie. Not so bad.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

Souness critics must eat humble pie as he transforms Newcastle.

Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I’m more interested in, there’s the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

They advertise the bejeeezus out of yogurt, but I haven’t seen one pie commercial.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen pie advertised. That’s how you know it’s good. They advertise ice cream and other desserts.

It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights.