No one has the right to live without being shocked.

When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.

I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: "Nobody understands me" and "I'm the only genius in the world" and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.

Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.

A murderer was a worthy companion.

Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.