You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasurethe knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! from the preface; on writing for people around the world