I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!

"That's done it!" said Sam. "Now I've rung the front-door bell!"

And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

There are other men, and other lives, and time still to be.

I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

I don't feel any guilt complex about The Lord of the Rings.