People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

And what do you really do? asked Tiffany. The thin witch hesitatied for a moment, and then: We look to ... the edges, said Mistress Weatherwax. There's a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong ... an' they need watchin'. We watch 'em, we guard the sum of things. And we never ask for any reward. That's important.

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.

Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'