I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism those petty good feelings pity and remorse?

Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings a round of little cares or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs they become naturally only objects of sense.

Strength of character means the ability to overcome resentment against others to hide hurt feelings and to forgive quickly.

We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.

Similarly thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings but it includes the state of the body it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

If I could be more vague I'd write more about people in my life but I hate hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. I've done that before. Unless they're sad songs. Those get finished fast but the mean ones often end up at the back of the bottom drawer and it's probably for the best.

I think one of the downsides of the sort of obsession with romantic love and personal fulfillment is that the plain fact of the matter is that those feelings don't last for ever and so they better be replaced and reinforced by things that do.

Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.

Well there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.