Por muy lejos que te vayas, nunca conseguirás huir de ti mismo.

Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future…

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And...

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl,...

There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.”There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.

I lost some time once. It’s always in the last place you look for it.

Strategy number one is that I always, or almost always, have at least two or three different things that I’m writing at any one time.

We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall

He’d been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into...

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer...

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to...

If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.

You hurt. It’s okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be...

In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of...

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be...

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me,...

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down...

No milk,” I said.”No milk,” said my sister.I watched my dad think about this. He looked like he was going to suggest that we have something for breakfast that you do not need milk for,...

When you’re 11, walking home from school through this strange little English landscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head … well, now this is one of those ‘I’ve never told anybody this before’...

Also, I’ve already won all the awards.

He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been...

This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager,...

Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people’s voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only...

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert’s dream not his. And he told me that...

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you...

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago....

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

I think all – or the ones thet I’ve run into – tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be...

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream… But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often...

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. “Calling cats,” it confided, “tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.Not that year.Winter hung in there, like an invalid...

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I’ve written.