You may be right,' she said, a phrase which here meant 'I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.

I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.

It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.

Figuratively, they escaped from Cout Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf's evil in loco parentis ways.

But I must admit I miss you terribly. The world is too quiet without you nearby.

Scolding must be very, very fun, otherwise children would be allowed to do it. It is not because children don’t have what it takes to scold. You need only three things, really. You need time, to think up scolding things to say. You need effort, to put these scolding things in a good order, so that the scolding can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand in front of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.

Like most writers, I look back on all of my finished works with utter regret, and the trouble with writing a series of novels is that you have to go back and read them, and make sure that you haven't forgotten anything you've created, and then when you do that, you're faced with your own mistakes on every trick, from the wrong word in places to entirely the wrong incident.