To be a cult figure in one's own lifetime is most unpleasant.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Fare well we call to hearth and hall Though wind may blow and rain may fall We must away ere break of day Over the wood and mountain tall To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell In glades beneath the misty fell Through moor and waste we ride in haste And wither then we cannot tell With foes ahead behind us dread Beneath the sky shall be our bed Until at last our toil be sped Our journey done, our errand sped We must away! We must away! We ride before the break of day!

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.

Speak politely to an enraged dragon.

To think I should have lived to be goodmorninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!