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.

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?

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,’