I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

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

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.

And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.