Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light.

Character of any person is the aggregate of his or her conscientious tendencies - the sum total of the knacks of the civilized part of the mind.

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

Rise or fall, we will live on

Gardening is, apart from having children, the most rewarding thing in life

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

Hollywood - that's a place where love is viewed both pragmatically and philosophically in the saying, 'Tis better to have loved and divorced than never to have had any publicity at all.

There is no art without a poetic aim.

If you want to play piano, you just gotta love piano, and I loved the way that music sounded from the beginning. Always did - everything about an instrument I loved.

Give me twenty-six soldiers of lead and I will conquer the world.

You can’t coach desire, and no matter how fancy your training plan or how high your stated goals are, it comes down to getting out the door and doing the work day after day.