I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.