I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.

To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.

So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.

I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I'm not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, "But he was really good at that. Why isn't he still doing it?"

What would be the fun in doing things you know are going to work?

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.