But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!

What is worth having is worth working for.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.