J. M. Barrie on Fairies

“Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.”

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.”

“It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.”

“When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks.”