You’re Hell’s Angels, then? What chapter are you from?”REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.

Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves.

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you...

All that I did,” she said, “everything I tried to do. All for nothing.” Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made...

I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,’ she opined, ‘like having someone else break in one’s own pony.

But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of...

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...

It’s astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or...

I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from...

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.

Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight.

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

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

When I started doing Sandman, I could look at a group of people lined up to get my autograph, and I knew who was my fan and who was somebody’s mum there to get a...

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

… and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn’t, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of...

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how...

If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a...

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.

I don’t know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put into words.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I...

But then it occured to him that any progress he had made on his quest so far he had made by accepting the help that had been offered to him.

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...

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little wish hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The...

Leave no path untaken.

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

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

I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

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...

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.

I’ll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters.

Fat Charlie wasn’t sure that he liked freedom, … There was too much open air involved.

I think of myself as a very lazy author.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.

They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran’s heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big...

I think, well, I’ve had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn’t fair. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time… But I think, any God...

The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and...

Non era stato coraggioso, restando lì fermo a farsi pungere – disse Coraline al gatto. – Non era stato coraggioso perché non aveva avuto paura: quella era l’unica cosa che potesse fare. Ma quando era...

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,...