“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

Kindness – that simple word. To be kind – it covers everything, to my mind. If you’re kind that’s it.

Rainbow drops – suck them and you can spit in six different colours.

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It’s not possible.

When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.

I am suspicious of both facility and speed.

We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.

If the Good Lord intended for us to walk, he wouldn’t have invented rollar skates.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

Me is the only one what won’t be gobbled up because giants is never eating giants.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I’m wondering what to read next.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life.

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

There is no book so bad that some good can not be got out of it.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one’s movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

To whom do I give my new elegant little book? Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?

A book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.