I thought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.