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.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?””Stories. And they give me hope.

Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it...

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Říká se, že příběhy o strašidlech jsou optimistické, protože věří v posmrtný život.

Songs remain. They last…A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That’s the power of songs.

“The devil made me do it” I have never made one of them do anything. They live their own lives. I do not live their lives for them.

I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot...

That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the...

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don’t tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren’t...

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early,...

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the...

Great art is anything that provokes a deep emotinal reaction at the time that you hear it and then you can’t get it out of your head. And then you go back and you experince...

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that...

I love the word ‘fantasy’… but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the...

You aren’t allowed out of the graveyard -it’s aren’t, by the way, not amn’t, not these days-because it’s only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this...

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

No, look, there’s a blue box. It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it’s meant to go. And when...

That’s the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful...

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

It’s still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.

The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal...