I'm up to my neck in the real world, every day. Just you try doing your VAT return with a head full of goblins.

You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.

The important thing about adventures, thought Mr. Bunnsy, was that they shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.")