9 Quotes by Humphrey Carpenter

It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the guise of an elderly professor. The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away, roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-Earth.

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, "We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

I can write, He floated up to the ceiling, and a baby rabbit came out of his pocket, grew wings, and flew away. And you will believe that it really happened. That's magic, isn't it?

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.

This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.

One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.