This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight...

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all...

It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

Fiction is dangerous because it lets you into other people’s heads. It shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one you live in.” At the first nationally recognized science fiction convention...

The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it.”What do you want?’ it repeated.He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realised he did not.’Well? You come...

The universe is amply supplied with night.

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.”[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it’s very, very classical, and in some ways I’m breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can’t do.

The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. “What a refreshing mind you have, young man,” he said. “There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

It was a survival thing: he didn’t answer back, didn’t say anything about job security for prison guards, debate the nature of repentance, rehabilitation, or rates of recidivism. He didn’t say anything funny or clever,...

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely...

I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people...

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for...

The black bird cocked its head to one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, ‘You shadow man.”I’m Shadow,’ said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its...

Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.

So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank...

Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.

You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to...

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ‘what kind of tea?

Liberty,” boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

I don’t really like driving in the snow. There’s something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It’s like tumbling into a field...

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.

`Oh my God, Dad, my friends are coming over, you’re not allowed to speak to them,’

Nobody’s cool, if you’ve got kids.

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they’re on a tour.

A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when...

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how...

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real...

When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the...

Gee-word?””Gods. What were you doin’ the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?””Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger’s balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.

I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely...

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do...

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale – they are well-equipped to deal with these

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

Of course you don’t believe in fairies. You’re fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn’t...

I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?

A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now, that’s a question.

Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?” asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. “It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something...

Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have...