All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of.

Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.

I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.