“Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.”

The best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones.

Well, you know what grown-ups are,’ said Dinah. ‘They don’t think the same way as we do.

Here Mr Potts come here you little idiot!

To wish undone something you have done, to wish you could look back on kindness to someone you love, instead of on unkindness – that is a very terrible thing.

The point is not that I don’t recognise bad people when I see them – I grant you I may quite well be taken in by them – the point is that I know a good person when I see one.

It wasn’t a bit of good fighting grown-ups. They could do exactly as they liked.

Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made them see into people’s minds and know when anything unusual was going on.

You are honest enough by nature to be able to see and judge your own self clearly – and that is a great thing.

I get over a hundred letters a day from all over the world, from children and parents, and it’s a wonder I ever have time to write books, let alone speak!

If you can’t look after something in your care, you have no right to keep it.

The secret island had looked mysterious enough on the night they had seen it before – but now, swimming in the hot June haze, it seemed more enchanting than ever.

Make up your mind about things, by all means – but if something happens to show that you are wrong, then it is feeble not to change your mind,

We must have Christian ethics for our children, good and strong, but we must make them attractive, too, and it can be done.

Soon they were all sitting on the rocky ledge, which was still warm, watching the sun go down into the lake.

I don’t believe in things like that – fairies or brownies or magic or anything. It’s old-fashioned.’ ‘

There was a dish of salt for everyone to dip their eggs into. ‘I don’t know why, but the meals we have on picnics always taste so much nicer than the ones we have indoors,’ said George.

The Kate Winslet thing has been a shocker. I was like, that is the most ridiculous claim.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

Hip-hop has done more for race relations than most cultural icons; and I say save Martin Luther King, because his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was realized when Obama was elected into office.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?

It is when we think we lead that we are most led.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.