“Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.”

Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Success is somebody else’s failure.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.

Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

I’m looking forward to the intensity of football and how the people live football in Liverpool. It’s a special club.

I prefer to focus on what is coming next and I am really looking forward to it.

Go forward bravely. Fear nothing. Trust in God; all will be well.

Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.