Walter Plinge said: "You know she asked me a very silly question Mrs Ogg! It was a silly question any fool knows the answer!" "Oh, yes," said Nanny. "About houses on fire, I expect..." "Yes! What would I take out of our house if it was on fire!" "I expect you were a good boy and said you'd take your mum," said Nanny. "No! My mum would take herself!" "What would you take out then, Walter?" Nanny said. "The fire!

We live and learn, or, perhaps more importantly we learn and live.

Chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes.

I can't be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I'd be mad, and I'm not mad, so trees can't talk.

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much.

I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.