The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It’s RUBBISH, death. It’s STUPID. I don’t want nothing to do with it.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don’t to make it all bearable.

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.

He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.

Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.

I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had...

Mirrors,’ she said, ‘are never to be trusted.

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?”Neil Gaiman: “Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.”[Jumbo.com, 21 August 2012]

Nenhum homem, afirmou Donne, é uma ilha, mas estava errado. Se não fôssemos ilhas, perder-nos-íamos, afogados nas tragédias uns dos outros.

Traveling through the Dragon’s Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:”So,” said Silas. “Now there are only three of...

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately,...

Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

These things are wine, women and song”…”Curry’s nice too” pointed out Fat Charlie

You’re playing with fire,” she warned him.”That’s how I know I’m alive.

The best thing I think about me and Dave as a creative team is, we don’t have to work together. We both have individual careers,

There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican...

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in...

It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

I don’t think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it’s raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable,...

You know I love you,’ said the other mother flatly.’You have a very funny way of showing it,’ said Coraline.

The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

As sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard’s parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived...

You can’t run away from home without destroying somebody’s world.

Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some...

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never...

You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are, things are flat. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss…Less.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?

Authors know that you should never really write a funny book because funny books do not get awards. Comic novels will not get awards.

Sem indivíduos, vemos apenas números: mil mortos, cem mil mortos, «as mortes podem chegar a um milhão». Com as histórias individuais, as estatísticas transformam-se em pessoas – mas até isso é mentira, pois as pessoas...

I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.

Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you’ll see the worldIf I’m not mistaken…Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure…Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from...

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made...

If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of...

Being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared.

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn’t, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon...

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny...

[Dream] I do not want a grape.[Desire] I could make you want one.

You are almost never cool to your children.