“It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.”

“Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.”

“In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there's a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is-well, it's magic, isn't it? Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.”

“Do you think they're still there?''Where?''Greece. Egypt. The islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked where those people walked you'd see the gods?''Maybe. But I don't think people'd know that was what they'd seen.”

“Chantal is having a relationship with a sentence. Just one of those things. A chance meeting that grew into something important for the both of them.”

“If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”

“And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.”