The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny...

[Dream] I do not want a grape.[Desire] I could make you want one.

You are almost never cool to your children.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?””Stories. And they give me hope.

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.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it...

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Říká se, že příběhy o strašidlech jsou optimistické, protože věří v posmrtný život.

Songs remain. They last…A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That’s the power of songs.

“The devil made me do it” I have never made one of them do anything. They live their own lives. I do not live their lives for them.

I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot...

That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the...

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don’t tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren’t...

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early,...

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the...

Great art is anything that provokes a deep emotinal reaction at the time that you hear it and then you can’t get it out of your head. And then you go back and you experince...

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...

I love the word ‘fantasy’… but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the...

You aren’t allowed out of the graveyard -it’s aren’t, by the way, not amn’t, not these days-because it’s only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this...

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

No, look, there’s a blue box. It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it’s meant to go. And when...

That’s the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful...

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

It’s still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.

The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal...

Writing a book is lonelier and slower than writing comics. The joy of comics is that you have somebody to talk to. What you’re writing isn’t what anybody reads, it’s a letter to an artist....

It’s an America with strange mythic depths. I see it as a distorting mirror; a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic. It’s about the soul of America, really. What people brought to...

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with...

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was...

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they’ve got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?””No, Matthew. What do they say?””The king is...

But the truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do with it.”(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world...

but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter? Your dreams is spillin’ over into my dreams, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been doin’ with, it’s dates. William the Conker, ten sixty-six, that’s as...

How old are you? “About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did,” Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, “And I still feels like I done when I was a...

People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills,...

Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she...

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have...

I was you’re guardian. But you are old enough to guard yourself. I have other things to protect.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at...

What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you...

Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman…

Will eventually grow up and get a real job. Until then, will keep making things up and writing them down.