No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it.
I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
It's not a sign of creativity to have sixty-five ideas for one problem. It's just a waste of energy.
Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.
Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.
The process of being filmed was, I found, peculiar but not discomfiting. At 13, you are malleable, adaptable, better able to take the unusual in your stride.
I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.
Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.
To him who, though by no means near the end, is yet advancing, He is the way; to him who has put off all that is dead He is the life.
It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
I would say I don't like people who are really into themselves or are very materialistic. Just always talking themselves up. Not being real is the pet peeve. Be true to yourself.
I fed my yak on my spare Cadbury chocolate 21,0000ft up Everest. It was a blonde, very sweet female yak. I made it my pet after that.
I have a lot of plants and fish and a pet lizard and Venus flytraps. I have a whole ecosystem in my room, like a running waterfall and different lights and sensors set on digital timers.
Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We're wrong.
Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.
Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.
I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild.
I use so much of myself in everything I do. I think every actor does because you have no one else to go to but yourself and your own imagination.
The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
Working with Scorsese was an absolute dream, and one of my favourite ever jobs was 'Beowulf' because it was just pure acting. Your imagination explodes as you try to imagine you're fighting a dragon or whatever.
