...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.