I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.

All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

I was told once by some country people that a magician should never tell his dreams because the telling will make them come true. But I say that is great nonsense.

And the name of the one shall be Fearfulness. And the name of the other shall be Arrogance... Well, clearly you are not Fearfulness, so I suppose you must be Arrogance.' This was not very polite.

He had once found himself in a room with Lady Bessborough's long-haired white cat. He happened to be dressed in an immaculate black coat and trousers, and was there thoroughly alarmed by the cat's stalking round and round and making motions as if it proposed to sit upon him. He waited until he believed himself to be unobserved, then he picked it up, opened a window, and tossed it out. Despite falling three storeys to the ground, the cat survived, but one of its legs was never quite right afterward and it always evinced the greatest dislike of gentlemen in black clothes.