It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk thesame way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs toadults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find thespaces between fences.

But Wututu continued to cry, walking with a heavy heart, feeling pain and anger and fear as only a child can feel it: raw and overwhelming