'Aren't there any grownups at all?' 'I don't think so.' The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realized ambition overcame him. In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy. 'No grownups!'

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

'I was the only boy in our school what had asthma,' said the fat boy with a touch of pride. 'And I've been wearing specs since I was three.'

The very day after I learned that I was the laureate for literature for 1983 I drove into a country town and parked my car where I should not. I only left the …

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, …

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment…

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.