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.

25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment...

Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.

You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ”Neil, you’re an educated man. Where does it say…”He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay...

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were,...

You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin...

The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because...

The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time...

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.The two are rarely...

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They’re just names for sides. We know that.

This book is the book you have just read. It’s done.

•They’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they...

Os deuses morrem. E, quando morrem mesmo, são esquecidos e ninguém os chora. As ideias são mais difíceis de matar do que as pessoas, mas, no fim, é possível matá-las.

So life isn’t exciting?” continued Gary. “Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight. I’ll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?” He turned and looked at...

Anyone who calls you “little lady” has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

Hasn’t there always been a moon?””Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky–it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green...

Somebody would say, `Can you write us an article about big, bodice-ripping, blockbusting romance novels?’ And I’d say, `Yes, of course,’ because I was a hungry young journalist.

It is said that scattered through Despair’s domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will...

Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess...

Of course, everyone’s parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe...

It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.

It’s not what I’d want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their...

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of...

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not...

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother,...

Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s...

This is a roadside attraction,’ said Wednesday. ‘One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.

Nearly’ only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

I never fell. I don’t care what they say. I’m still doing my job, as I see it.

What’s your name,’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?”Cats don’t have names,’ it said.’No?’ said Coraline.’No,’ said the cat. ‘Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We...

Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie’s mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of “Back! Foul best of Hell!” followed by gasps of “Is it alive?” and a nervous inquiry as to whether...

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside...

Old, old, drink. Tiiiiny little drink. Very small. Almost not there.” She began to hiccup.

And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

CORALINE’S STORYTHERE WAS A GIRL HER NAME WAS APPLE. SHE USED TO DANCE A LOT. SHE DANCED AND DANCED UNTIL HER FEET TURND INTO SOSSAJES. THE END.

Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living...

I’m not blessed, or merciful. I’m just me. I’ve got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we’re talking, I’m there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die...

Sexton: I think the whole world’s gone mad.Death: Uh-uh. It’s always like this. You probably just don’t get out enough.

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises…

Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.