“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.”

“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.”

“READING A GOOD BOOK IS LIKE LIVING ANOTHER LIFE. THE BEST PART IS, YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT.”

“Youths as children will see no wrong but feel it, as juveniles youths will see and feel wrongs and cope anyway they can, as adults spend a life time trying to forget the cruelties and memories of those wrongs they once knew.”

“Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.”

“We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm.”

“I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”