“But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”

“It is very seldom,” the young man said at last, “that dragons ask to do men favours.”“But it is very common,” said the dragon, “for cats to play with mice before they kill them.”

“I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.”

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”

“The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

“The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”