Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.

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.")

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.

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

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure.