I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.

Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There's the rock-hard certainty of personal experience ("I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,"), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there's the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras's theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major.

Imagination is a form of seeing