“That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.”

“That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

“I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.”

“Waste of time," said the leper. "There's a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they'll swear they've been crippled or blind for years then stage a bloody miraculous recovery. Holy men? Healers? Don't make me laugh.""But this man is different," said Christ."I remember him," said the blind man. "Jesus. He come here on the sabbath, like a fool. The priests wouldn't let him heal anyone on sabbath. He should've known that.""But he did heal someone," said the lame man. "Old Hiram. You remember that. He told him to take up his bed and walk.""Bloody rubbish," said the blind man. "Hiram went as far as the temple gate, then he lay down and went on begging. Old Sarah told me. He said what was the use of taking his living away? Begging was the only thing he knew how to do. You and your blether about goodness," he said, turning to Christ, "where's the goodness in throwing an old man out into the street without a trade, without a home, without a penny? Eh? That Jesus is asking too much of people.""But he was good," said the lame man. "I don't care what you say. You could feel it, you could see it in his eyes.""I never saw it," said the blind man.”

“Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.”

“We can control the future, my boy, just as we wind up the mechanism in a clock. Say to yourself: I will win that race--I will come first--and you wind up the future like clockwork. The world has no choice but to obey! Can the hands of that old clock in the corner decide to stop? Can the spring in your watch decide to wind itself up and run backward? No! They have no choice. And nor has the future, once you have wound it up.”

“This is the thing that takes me longest of all when I'm beginning a novel, to work out what the limits are, what the powers of the narrator will be, what is the appropriate tone to take. And where do I see things from: am I watching this, as it were, from stage right or stage left? That makes a difference. Mike Alfreds is an English director who has a company called Shared Experience. They do a lot of adaptations of novels. He's discovered that when they use a narrator, if they put the narrator stage right, the audience perceives the narrator as being somehow involved, warm, part of what's going on. If he puts the narrator stage left, the audience feels the narrator to be critical, detached....Ever since then, I have to say, whenever I do a conversation with someone on the stage, I take care to be stage right. But that's an aspect of where you're seeing it from, you see, whether the narrator is viewing the characters, as it were, sympathetically or, as it were, critically. This takes a while to discover for each book.”