Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

I think we ought to live happily ever after.

Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things.

A library is a place full of mouth-watering food for thought.

Settle for what you can get, but first ask for the World.

To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.

Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.

Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.

One person ought to treat another person properly, even if the person's himself.

Hope is the forward-looking part of memory.

Being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel.

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.

You've no right to walk into people's castles and take their guitars.

A fickle heart is the only constant in this world

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

It does seem that a fantasy, working out in its own terms, stretching you beyond the normal concerns of your own life, gains you a peculiar charge of energy which inexplicably enriches you. At least, this is my ideal of a fantasy, and I am always trying to write it.

Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time.

The truth between two people always cuts two ways.

And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.

That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.

I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.

My shining dishonesty will be the salvation of me.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

"Eight Days of Luke" was refused by another confused publisher on the grounds that children shouldn't strike matches. When my agent pointed out that David in the book was twelve years old, the publisher said that he was striking matches to summon the devil, then, and this couldn't be allowed.

You cannot rob robbers with a kitten in your hat!

I think my moment of revelation came when I saw this young man come on court in the most flamboyant clothes. He had a sweet smile and questionably blonde hair and a generally chirpy glamour that in fact concealed huge skill. When he was interviewed he confessed to hating to get angry and it was also said that he slithered out of winning when it came to the big matches. And I thought, My God! This Andre Agassi is the image of Howl in my book HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE!