“I think I have this thing where everybody has to think I'm the greatest.And if they aren't completely knocked out and dazzled and slightly intimidated by me, I don't feel good about myself.”

“Perhaps it's chasing me. But I don't think it will ever catch me because I am moving fast.”

“Do you wonder then that this man’s behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.”

“And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.”

“Now that I am alone, I don't have to hide it; I don't have to hide anything any longer. I can let my face go because no one can see me; because there's twenty-one thousand feet between me and them... No, I don't have to press my teeth together or tighten the muscles of my jaw...”

“I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.”

“A girl should think about making herself look attractive so she can get a good husband later on. Looks is more important than books, Miss Hunky...""The name is Honey," Miss Honey said."Now look at me," Mrs Wormwood said. "Then look at you. You chose books. I chose looks.”