This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren’t interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.
My only real claim to anyone’s attention lies in my writing.
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.
I’m perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.
There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.
But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know.
I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.
Do not lie to the Scholar.
All things from the north are devilish.
For that reason you can’t write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you’re writing, and for that you need silence.
No one has the right to live without being shocked.
Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.
We have to learn everything we do.
And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.
Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?
It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It’s impossible, and if it isn’t impossible, it’s irrelevant, and if it isn’t either of those things, it’s embarrassing.