Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.

The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.

One of the great things about humor is, you can slip things past people with humor, you can use it as a sweetener. So you can actually tell them things, give them messages, get terribly, terribly serious and terribly, terribly dark, and because there are jokes in there, they'll go along with you, and they'll travel a lot further along with you than they would otherwise.

And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.

I was not scared of anything, when I read my book.

Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.