"Oh, I'm definitely a wild child."

“I wanted to take a damaged individual in a damaged society with damaged relationships between nations and take a look at how this individual survives amongst them, and that for me as a writer is the connection that you needed to get inside the skin of the main character and wonder how he's going to cope with all this.”

“"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.”

“The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.”

“Things go away to return, brightened for the passage”

“The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us.”

Source : "The Clumsy Embrace". Interview with Kevin D. Miller, www.christianitytoday.com. October 26, 1998.

“Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.”

“Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.”

Source : Norton Juster (2011). “The Phantom Tollbooth 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.175, Knopf Books for Young Readers

“we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.”