"What turns the frog into a prince? If you say the princess’s kiss you have been misinformed. Read what the story says: “She picked him up and she threw him against the wall as hard as she could, ‘Now will you be satisfied you nasty frog?’ As he fell to the ground he was no longer a frog but a prince with kind and beautiful eyes.” “It makes no sense!” complained Maurice Sendak. He refused to believe it. I had the happiness of translating the stories in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales for Grimm for Sendak’s illustrations."

"On my eighth birthday my mother gave me a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The inscription read: ‘Here is the brother you said you wanted.’ I was having trouble in school—particularly reading—and a psychologist had recently tested me and informed my mother and the school that I was, in the parlance of the day, ‘retarded.’ My mother steadfastly refused to accept this, saying, ‘You just haven’t found anything you care enough about to read.’ It turned out I was dyslexic and perhaps mildly autistic. It took me months, and when I was done, I could read, and I had indeed been given a brother—two, in fact, and I have visited with them every year since my eighth birthday."

"The most thoroughly satisfying and perhaps only perfect film ever made. I forget which director said they should close all the film schools and just show the students The Third Man thirty times. It bears at least a dozen reseeings, with something new and fine discovered each time. And to think that Benzedrine-riddled David O. Selznick tried to transform the fabulous final moments into a happy ending; but Carol Reed refused, standing up for all of us. This year I found and stood in the dark Vienna doorway where Orson Welles stood when the kitty licked his shoe . . . and had my picture taken. I can find but one tiny glitch: Harry Lime’s address. It’s spoken by Joseph Cotten as “fünfzehn Josefsplatz,” but, moments later, the building with the caryatids prominently bears the number fünf. Okay, so no movie’s perfect."