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.

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.

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...

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager,...

Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people’s voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only...

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert’s dream not his. And he told me that...

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.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be...

In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of...

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be...

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me,...

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down...

No milk,” I said.”No milk,” said my sister.I watched my dad think about this. He looked like he was going to suggest that we have something for breakfast that you do not need milk for,...

When you’re 11, walking home from school through this strange little English landscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head … well, now this is one of those ‘I’ve never told anybody this before’...

Also, I’ve already won all the awards.

He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been...

This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn’t that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell...