For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

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.

We have to learn everything we do.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.