I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.