Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.And that is, more or less, everything...

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 pretty when you see them under a leaf in the...

The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to...

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a...

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?

Firstly, there is no such person as Death. Second, Death’s this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant...

I’ll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you’re trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

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.

As we write we summon little demons.

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I...

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed....

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...

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and...

I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always...

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...

I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love – drawn to their objects...

If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; thatwitches are often betrayed by their appetites;dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;hearts can be well-hidden,and you betray them with...

So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to...

It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared....

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

It’s not sipping wine. It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway....

This one’s for you.

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

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

Don’t confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being...

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think...

Promise?”I promise.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as suchAlthough I liked a few folk pretty wellLove must be vaster than my smiles or touchfor brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls...

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old...

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.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Walk any path in Destiny’s garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.

I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and...

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...

If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something.

you do your own time in prison. You don’t do anyone else’s time for them.

You are not dead, until every person who knew you is dead as well.” Where did I hear that? It doesn’t matter. There is a village in my head.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

I will not be my father’s dog.