“Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!”

You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of.

Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

You chose books, I chose looks . Now see the difference?

When you’re old enough to write a book for children, by then you’ll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you’re an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.

Candy is dandy but liqueur is quicker.

Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.

Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!

Two rights don’t equal a left.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children – as long as you make them laugh as well.

We all have our moments of brilliance and glory.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

Don’t gobblefunk around with words.

I just said let’s get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too.

Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form – the blues.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers’ growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.