Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.

I had done battle with a great fear and the victory was mine.

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.

Garlic, like perfume, must be used with discretion and on the proper occasions.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men