Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.

Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.

In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there's a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is-well, it's magic, isn't it? Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.