GO FOR HIS EYES! OR BITE HIM ON THE NOSE! DRAGON NOSES ARE VERY SENSITIVE!" Oh, very helpful, Camicazi, very helpful...thought Hiccup. What if he doesn't obligingly hold me up to his nose? What if the only part I get close to is the TEETH?

A Chief must show no fear, no worry... A Chief is a leader first, and a man second.

I was not a natural. . . . This is the story of becoming . . . the Hard Way.

For a Hero cannot triumph all the time. Sometimes he will be defeated, and how he faces that defeat is a test of his character.

The past is another land, and we cannot go to visit. So, if I say there were dragons, and men who rode upon their backs, who alive has been there and can tell me that I'm wrong?

The dragons I would write about would not be the rather generalized, big, green things that I had read about in storybooks. What I wanted to create was a multiplicity of different dragon species, of all shapes and sizes, adapted to their environment and habitats in the same way as birds or other animals we see today.

Sometimes it is only a True Friend who knows what we mean when we try to speak. Somebody who has spent a lot of time with us, and listens carefully to what we are trying to say, and tries to understand.