Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?