Perhaps we are born knowing the tales of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is not of surprise but of recognition.

And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

More and more I’ve become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown.

I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.