I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house.
It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.
I did know what it meant when you say you promise something. You have to say that you will never do something again and then you must never do it because that would make the promise a lie.
Reading is primarily a symptom. Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be still and quiet, of our ability to dream during daylight.
She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.
So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.
Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer.
La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.
But I don’t take notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won’t go to prison.
After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie’s flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.
It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn’t even know existed.
For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
I don’t mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.