Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children – as long as you make them laugh as well.
Some children are spoiled and it is not their fault, it is their parents.
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
When I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys along the way. We would set out together after school across the village green.
I began to realise that the large chocolate companies actually did possess inventing rooms, and they took their inventing very seriously.
Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.
Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.
Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
Game-playing at school is always fun if you happen to be good at it, and it is hell if you are not. I was one of the lucky ones.
Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.
The summer holidays! The magic words! The mere mention of them used to send shivers of joy rippling over my skin.
Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
Throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten.