I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful..

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm..

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay o….

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the….

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children..

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me..

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we can….

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain ….

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants..

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his e….

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war..

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong..

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do..

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing..

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallo….

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of p….

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark..

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality..

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them..

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that..

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream..