"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."

"American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them."

"The dead can't hurt you, they're dead. Living things can hurt you, living people can hurt you but the dead can't."

"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."

"All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them."

"It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck."

"We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it."

"Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did."

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."

"And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then."

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands."

"People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen."

"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences."

"It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head."

"The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp."

"I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You're the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You're my letter to desire: And you'll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You're my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends."

"This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it."

"Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba."

"The quickest way is sometimes the longest."

"I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes."

"Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable."

"Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky."

"Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent."

"Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things."

"That's right," said Door. Her cheek lightly grazed and her dirty reddish hair was tangled; tangled but not matted. And her eyes...Richard realized that he could not tell what color her eyes were. They were not blue, or green, or brown, or gray; they reminded him of fire opals: there were burning greens and blues, and even reds and yellows that vanished and glinted as she moved."

"Books were safer than other people anyway."

"You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."

"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What's that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It's just a matter of how you tell the story. That's all."

"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."

"On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok."

"Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us."

"Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly."Would you like one?" she asked the little dog."Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool.""I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her."Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat."

"I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin."

"Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken."

"We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall."

"She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered. She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever."

"I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark."

"The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could."

"She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did."

"Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians."

"What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don't you agree?"

"The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved."

"The universe is amply supplied with night."

"Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear."

"Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are." The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes."Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow."Fuck you," said the raven."

"I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt."

"Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you."

"The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"You don't need princes to save you. I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men."