... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

I hate writing, I love having written.

[Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven's sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.

Friends come and go but I wouldn't have thought you'd be one of them

If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.