The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would.

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.

All things from the north are devilish.

And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty-face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.

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

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.