...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

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

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.