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.

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...

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.

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.