The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Of course I loved books more than people.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Destiny, if I could sit across the porch from God, I'd thank Him for Lending me you.....

You are not what your critics say you are. You are wonderful sacred-soul.

Mathematics should be studied if only for that it puts the mind in order.

A family needs to work as a team, supporting each other's individual aims and aspirations.

Life responds to deserve and not to need.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

I'm the best at being lucky.

Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life.

Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears, Groping our way along the downward slope of Years!