Just a flesh wound.

No me queda más que un día de vida, después de haber escatimado quince millares a la muerte, sólo me resta uno más. Dos, a lo sumo

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed...

I knew I would stay in this town when I found the blue enamel pot floating in the lake. The pot led me to the house, the house led me to the book, the book...

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last...

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail...

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still...

It was dark, so I couldn’t make out much of her face, but she had brilliant red hair, like honey and roses and the sun altogether.

I sit on the bed. I remember a golden bracelet, thin gold, an apple with a bite taken out of it for the clasp, and the words “I Love You,” and I take it out...

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...

How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?

Ivy turned. ‘He bit you on the neck?’ she said, deadpan serious but for her eyes. ‘Oh, then it’s got to be love. She won’t let me bite her neck.

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history...

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time...

To get here had been painful, but for once in my life I felt free.

Vampires. Honestly, they’re like children sometimes.

Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.

I prefer fact to fiction.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

…progress isn’t necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.

You’re not safe with me.”He cut me off, seeming to growl. “I don’t want to be safe. I want to be with you. You can’t do this alone.

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.

Finishing my thoughts aloud meant saying how my dad had passed, and I had failed. How I had smoked joints and lay in bed enabling my hopelessness. I’d been the ugly in my world.

…to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what’s made up is as important as what’s real.

…it’s my job to lead you to success, and, if you fail, it’s because I failed, not you.’” (Spoken by Bracke, told by Eric)

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass...

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest...

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Dr. Jules Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don’t want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I...

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to...

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic...

for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready

Only death can finish the fight, everything else only interrupts the fighting.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

Get lost in a story, in a dream fantasy…

I like to discover something new each day, to interpret the world in a way others might not, like a child might approach new experiences.

Books are an extension of our imagination

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of the Kool-Aid jingle is at once chilling and evocative. Donny Osmond is brilliant as James Jones.

The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.

Live life to the fullest and never forget the people that supported you along the way.

She had traveled to more cities, had experienced more scenes, than anyone she knew, and still she had come away from it all with only an abysmal sense of dissatisfaction. When would it all begin,...

In ActualHuman Rights are”caring” for Humans left on the planet

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper...

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies...

He is a free man, not because is in a poition of political power and influence that you will never be able to achieve, and not because he has more character and heart in his...