"Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information."

"Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us.""And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy]"Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?""It's lucky," said Kandar.Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced."Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply."

"Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?"

"I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them."

"He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times."

"Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless...as everything created has an end."

"There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire."

"And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be."

"Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?"

"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind."

"The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?""

"Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour."

"In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything."

"It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill."

"Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return..."

"Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept."

"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit."

"I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not."

"Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths."

"People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality."

"Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information."

"If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can."

"This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence."

"She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices."

"Believe," said the rumbling voice. "If you are to survive, you must believe.""Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth."Everything," roared the buffalo man."

"That's the moon,' I said.'Gran likes it like that,' said Lettie Hempstock.'But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it's full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it's not.''Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it's restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,' said Lettie. 'And you don't trip on the stairs."

"Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith.""You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes."

"The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?"

"Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain."

"Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants."

"So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them."

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

"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets."

"There were ten tongues within one head, and one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead." "What does it mean?" "A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening."

"The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had the chance to find out about it.-Adam to DEATH & the 4 horsepeople of the Apocalypse."

"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."

"If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you."

"I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time. And then it turned and I saw its face..."

"This book is the book you have just read. It's done."

"I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work."

"The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges."

"Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them."

"Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't."

"There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't."

"There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before."

"Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told - told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything."

"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."

"If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff."