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.

I mean, d’you know what eternity is? There’s this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there’s this little bird-“”What little bird?” said Aziraphale suspiciously.”This...

I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.”If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.

It doth not hurt”, whispered a faint voice, “She will take you life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take...

I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write...

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it...

I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different,...

I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don’t have to stay anywhere forever.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs...

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

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

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

I believe […] that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust...

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.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal...

Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…you give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss...

Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches...

•The moon in the duckpond was full as well, and I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who had gone fishing in a lake for the moon,...

I am hope.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t...

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as...

You got a lifetime. No more. No less.

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with...

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won’t need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings...

There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one…

You wouldn’t have to wash,” said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground...

Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.

Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?” Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. “He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus.” Josiah Worthington said, “He looks more...

Stardust.

I’m a fairly undisciplined writer.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get...

Now, where do I bring this thing down?” I asked. There was a hesitation, then, “You don’t. We didn’t design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in...

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.

Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It’s RUBBISH, death. It’s STUPID. I don’t want nothing to do with it.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

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

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.