I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.

For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.