"Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must."

"The one thing that 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."

"It's a weapon, I understand?""In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is."

"I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible."

"Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."

"But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?""Easy," said the cat. "Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it.""Small world," said Coraline."It's big enough for her," said the cat. "Spider's webs only have to be large enough to catch flies."

"In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly."

"Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth..."

"They're like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they're so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes."

"Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie's mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of "Back! Foul best of Hell!" followed by gasps of "Is it alive?" and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers."

"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."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"I'm a fairly undisciplined writer."

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled."

"In Muspell, at the edge of the flame, where the mist burns into light, where the land ends, stood Surtr, who existed before the gods. He stands there now...It is said that at Ragnarok, which is the end of the world, and only then, Surtr will leave his station. He will go forth from Muspell with his flaming sword and burn the world with fire, and one by one the gods will fall before him."

"The moments of dA©jA vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely."

"I'm an author. We don't want to lead. We don't need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people's heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don't. We never know. We just make stuff up."

"Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it's because we are easily bored."

"Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."

"You have a very open relationship with your fans.""Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers."

"It is a sea of blood. We come from the sea, Tim; our blood is salt, and strange tides ebb and flow within us all."

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."

"We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was."

"So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah."

"You're weird,' she said. 'You don't have any friends.''I didn't come here for friends,' said Bod truthfully. "i came here to learn.'Mo's nose twitched. "Do you know how weird that is?' she asked. "Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to."

"We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old."

"She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death."

"Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that."

"Suffering is sometimes cleansing, said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. "It can purify.""It can also fuck you up, said Shadow."

"If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal."

"I'm just a soul whose intentions are good,'" he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. '"Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

"It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much."

"She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable."

"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence."

"I like stories where women save themselves."

"I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer."

"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters."

"As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end."

"Black as night, sweet as sin."

"How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline."I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave.""Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline."Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back."

"And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him."

"And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art."

"I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating."

"The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do."

"It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men."

"Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."

"My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book."

"I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?"

"I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it."