Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.

Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.

Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.