"You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it."

"Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would."

"So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in."

"I don't really like driving in the snow. There's something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It's like tumbling into a field of stars."

"I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why."

"Some things are too big to be seen, some emotions are too huge to be felt."

"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger."

"Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I."

"If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us."

"My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant."

"A plop of rain hit me on the face, one of those early raindrops that turns up five minutes ahead of all the others to let you know it's time to get indoors."

"The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked, that's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

"I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?"

"I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options."

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."

"You're playing with fire," she warned him."That's how I know I'm alive."

"If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?"

"What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything."

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.You must remember this."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"We've had our ups and downs since then, but that's what families have, ups and downs."

"Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot."

"For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel."

"She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave."

"I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out."

"Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago."

"Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day."

"Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that " but you are the only you."

"Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island."

"There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber, she explained. "There's a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere-it doesn't all get used up at once. "I may still be hung over, sighed Richard. "That almost made sense."

"Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty."

"Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them."

"Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"You know, he said. "I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It's what we do. There was silence, in the high place."

"Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds."

"If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do."

"And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

"The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that."

"This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof."

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."

"A grayeyard is not a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy.."

"You're as plain as the nose on your face, said Mr. Pennyworth. "And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody."

"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not foolin' a soul."

"It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die."

"My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness."

"You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived."

"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."

"Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity."

"I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters."