Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.

In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.

I never said nothing..." "I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!

This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate . . .)

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.