You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats

Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then – our cities and towns cast too much light into the night – but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid...

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes…you’re Doing Something.

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even...

I don’t know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get...

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return…

So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o’...

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and...

The Marquis sighed. “I thought it was just a legend,” he said. “Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City.”Old Bailey nodded, sagely: “What, the big white buggers? They’re down there. I had...

It’s a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree,...

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can....

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines...

It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it....

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly… But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar… Ask yourselves, all of you… What power would hell have if...

Now go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like...

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Amy: This time can we… lose the bunk beds? The Doctor: No Bunk beds are cool, a bed with a ladder, you can’t beat that!

I already killed you once today, what does it take to teach some people?

I think the First Amendment is probably the most important thing that you have in this country. And I’m always horrified at the cavalier way that you (Americans) treat it.

Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.

I’m bored,” she said.”Learn how to tap-dance,” he suggested, without turning around.

It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong…I don’t like flowers, not really. I like growing...

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?””Then what died? who are you mourning?””A point of view.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things,...

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

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.

If this isn ‘ t literature, nothing is.