"Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans."

"I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection."

"He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted."

"Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut."

"This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory."

"The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising and it's magic and wonderful and strange."

"Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants."

"Adults follow paths. Children explore."

"Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending."

"Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story."

"This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power."

"I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe."

"Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

"I was not so old that I would deny my own senses."

"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life, said Spider. "These things are wine, women and song"..."Curry's nice too" pointed out Fat Charlie."

"As we write we summon little demons."

"CHORONZON "I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, Gods, worlds... of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"MORPHEUS "I am hope."

"Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong-in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn't even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art."

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."

"There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories."

"Do not fear the ghosts in this house; theyare the least of your worries.Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,The creaks and footsteps in the night,their little tricks of hiding things,or moving them, I findendearing, not upsettling. It makes the placefeel so much more like a home.Inhabited."

"I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies."

"Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept."

"The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties."

"The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves."

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."

"I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back."

"I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them."

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."

"Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week."

"Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished."

"Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams."

"I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it."

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

"Coraline tried drawing the mist. After ten minutes of drawing she still had a white sheet of paper with "MIST" written on it one corner in slightly wiggly letters. She grunted and passed it to her mother."Mm. Very modern, dear," said Coraline's mother."

"Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could."

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves."

"Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn."

"We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise."

"We often confuse what we wish for with what is."

"You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

"Only the Gods are real."

"Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here."

"The best thing-in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing-about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it."

"You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change."

"I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men."

"Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman..."

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."