Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven’t grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

We should have just killed him, that’s a lesson, don’t get creative with revenge

I think it’s important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew,...

Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was...

Any moment called now is always full of possibles.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear.””Christ Alive,” said Billy. “Are those my only choices?””I went for Lear,” said Leon. “Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy...

If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that it...

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then… what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a...

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.

In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss...

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I’m not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

There’s something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic – starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.

Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?” Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. “There you go, girl: You’re a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that’s all I need. Time for some reasonable...

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you’re a big boy. The sea’s full of saints and it’s been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were...

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.

I don’t generally publicly respond toreviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like...

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they...

A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge.

I just can’t get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they...

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if...

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.

We would never call inexplicable little insights ‘hunches,’ for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you...

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There’s a garuda to get airborne.

Things are going up in fire and never been there.” When she looked no wiser he said, “There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there...

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say their didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research.

For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal...

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit...

How do you…? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first...

Art is something you choose to make… it’s a bringing together of… of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

…where’s the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?