The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.

There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.

Imagination is a form of seeing

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

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.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

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.