Top 791 Quotes & Sayings by J. R. R. Tolkien - Page 14

I don't feel any guilt complex about The Lord of the Rings.

Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.

Ultimately we've only got humanity to work with. It's only clay we've got.

People remember Longfellow wrote Hiawatha, quite forget he was a Professor of Modern Languages!

If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you're normally troubled by heat and sand... then, to have just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside. Based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and of course, rustic people about.

Slight changes simply make a blur.

I'm a Roman Catholic! A devout Roman Catholic.

Very potent influence on myself has been Finnish.

I should have said Welsh has always attracted me. By its style and sound more than any other, ever though I first only saw it on coal trucks, I always wanted to know what it was about.

I'd got hobbits on my hands hadn't I?

At my age I'm exactly the kind of person who has lived through one of the most quickly changing periods known to history. Surely there could never be in seventy years so much change.