"I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws."

"Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds."

"Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky."

"I don't think that I've been in love as suchAlthough I liked a few folk pretty wellLove must be vaster than my smiles or touchfor brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls follow boys to foreign landsand men have followed women into hellIn plays and poems someone understandsthere's something makes us more than blood and boneand more than biological demands For me love's like the wind, unseen, unknownI see the trees are bending where it's beenI know that it leaves wreckage where it's blownI really don't know what "I love you" meansI think it means "don't leave me here alone."

"I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do."

"Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them."

"I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations."

"People tell you so much more when they know you're just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are."

"Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead."

"You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen."

"Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art."

"Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street."

"I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t."

"He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something."

"I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

"I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out."

"The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books."

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop.She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

"It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these."

"Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives."

"I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go."

"You know what my mum once said?' said Rosie. 'She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.'And this means?'Well', she said. 'It's interesting, isn't it?"

"Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found."

"Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."

"A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people."

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change."

"So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life."

"When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave."

"Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all."

"There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men."

"Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it."

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them."

"Frogs, ducks, rhinos, octopuses " whatever you desire. The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.' Coraline sighed. 'You really don't understand, do you?' she said. 'I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?"

"I will not be my father's dog."

"Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: "The song of the goat. Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why."

"But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way."

"People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song."

"Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words."

"It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

"I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot."

"They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with."

"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."

"You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline."

"I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book."

"It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient."

"She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest."