It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us-the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star-we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for, if you are honest, you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

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.

Who are you?" she inquired, as the cat passed by. I'm the cat that looked at a king," he replied. And I," she remarked with a toss of her head, "am the cow that jumped over the moon." Is that so?" said the cat. "Whatever for?" The cow stared. She had never been asked that question before. And suddenly it occured to her that there might something else to do than jumping over moons.

I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.