JAMES HERRIOT

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.

I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.

I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted animals by the roadside.

I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.

I will write another book if I feel like it.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.

I wish people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon us.

If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.

I hope to make people realize how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be kind and take care of their needs.

No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat.

I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.

And there was that letter from the Bramleys—that really made me feel good. You don’t find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else. There are still a few left, of course—old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers and when I come across any of them I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk with them and listen to the old Yorkshire words and expressions which have almost disappeared.

That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.

Over the years I knew her she always looked at me like that - as though I was a quite pleasant but amusing object - and it always did the same thing to me. It's difficult to put into words but perhaps I can best describe it by saying that if I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

Animals are unpredictable things, and so our life is unpredictable. It's a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you've got to really like it to stick it.

If I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

I think it was the beginning of Mrs. Bond's unquestioning faith in me when she saw me quickly enveloping the cat till all you could see of him was a small black and white head protruding from an immovable cocoon of cloth. He and i were now facing each other, more or less eyeball to eyeball, and George couldn't do a thing about it. As i say, I rather pride myself on this little expertise, and even today my veterinary colleagues have been known to remark, "Old Herriot may be limited in many respects, but by God he can wrap a cat.

Dogs like to obey. It gives them security.