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.

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

Tea is balm for the soul, don't you agree?

Don't you know that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?

Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.

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

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