Lists are a form of power.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.