It’s a weapon, I understand?””In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is.

I just want you to know,’ said the girl, coldly, ‘that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and...

He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did...

She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn’t bring them any closer, that they wouldn’t scare the birds...

Charitably… I think… sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.

So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

They weren’t making much sense; she decided they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses, but which can go...

[D]on’t ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that’s what they’re there for. Use your library). Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second...

Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.

Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust...

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or...

She smiled again. “Do you like cat?” she said.”Yes,” said Richard. “I quite like cats.”Anaesthesia looked relieved. “Thigh?” she asked, “or breast?

Do not lose hope – what you seek will be found.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve...

His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a...

I’ll come to you tonight, dear, when it’s late, You will not see me; you may feel a chill. I’ll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,And that will be your future on a...

I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

Remember your name. Do not lose hope —what you seek will be found.

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

You have a very open relationship with your fans.””Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.

Everything that is,casts a shadow

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commits acts they would otherwise find repulsive....

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

The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your ideas?”And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

Where does contagion end and art begin?

I was going to the library, too. I’d get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me...

The abbot cleared his throat. “You are all very stupid people,” he told them graciously, “and you do not know anything at all.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and...

We…we could be friends.’We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we’re not. At least, I’M not.

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.

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.