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What twelve year old wouldn't want to play an evil wizard?

When you're a kid, you should be a kid.

I've always performed magic as a kid.

Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.

I love the fact that little kids think I'm a witch. A mum might come over and say 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but my daughter thinks you're in 'Harry Potter.' I'll say 'That's cool' and take the kid aside and say, 'I'm a witch. If you don't listen to your mum, I'm going to haunt you!' It's brilliant. I can scare kids into doing their homework.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

'Harry Potter' achieved a very special act of actual magic: it made it completely acceptable for an adult to carry around, read and enjoy a children's book.

When I was playing Gandalf, I didn't think, 'Oh my dear, I'm playing a 7,000 year old wizard,' because I've never met one, and I don't know what they're like.

Magic speaks to the child in all of us. No matter how sophisticated we become, there's still a part of us who wants to believe in an alternative reality, where we can defy the laws of nature.

I did magic at children's parties when I was a kid.