Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

People like that don't need a reason apart from "because I can". They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.

I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, ... broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?' - when J.K. Rowling insisted she wasn't writing fantasy.