When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.

It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.

What is worth having is worth working for.

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

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Literary modernism kind of 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? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

It's only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.