Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
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.
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.
I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said… “You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.
Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It’s pain, It’s pleasure, Leave no path untaken.
For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.
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 there, or not to love someone who was.
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.
You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from ‘Instructions’)
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.
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.
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.
Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.” The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.”Say ‘Nevermore,'” said Shadow.”Fuck you,” said the raven.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.
Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘… Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.
The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.
You’re Hell’s Angels, then? What chapter are you from?”REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.
Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.
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.
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.
It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.
It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.
Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
They believe themselves Lucifer’s equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him… to him we no longer speak.
Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
She’s realized the real problem with stories — if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.
DEATH: “Mostly they aren’t too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear.”MORPHEUS: “And I am far more terrible than you, sister.
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.
So,” he asked. “How’s death?””Hard,” she said. “It just keeps going.
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.
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.
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.
Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?””Then what died? who are you mourning?””A point of view.
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.
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
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.
Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
It’s not what I’d want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.
I don’t know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put into words.
I really don’t know what “I love you” means.I think it means “Don’t leave me here alone.
Of course you don’t believe in fairies. You’re fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn’t a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.
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.
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ”Neil, you’re an educated man. Where does it say…”He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.
Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
But the truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do with it.”)
Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
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.
And life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.
I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises…
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.
He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.
She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don’t to make it all bearable.
Nearly’ only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.
The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
And why does he talk so funny? Doesn’t he mean squashed tomatoes?I don’t think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that’s just how they talk then.
I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.
Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar.“What number am I thinking of?” “I beg your pardon?” “What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.
Sexton: I think the whole world’s gone mad.Death: Uh-uh. It’s always like this. You probably just don’t get out enough.
What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.
Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.
The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your i
Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.
If you survive in battle, it is with Odin’s grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.
Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I’d rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.
People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.
We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Recounting the strange is like telling one’s dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one’s entire day.
Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.
I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.
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.
It’s oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head
Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept.
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.
Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.
This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song”…”Curry’s nice too” pointed out Fat Charlie
You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.
Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. ‘Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.
I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don’t have to stay anywhere forever.
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.
We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.
Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside.
I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.
Always good to remember when you’re making art. You don’t have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking.
If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,’ she opined, ‘like having someone else break in one’s own pony.
She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
Yeah, you and me, we can ride on a starIf you stay with me, girlWe can rule the worldYeah, you and me, we can light up the skyIf you stay by my sideWe can rule the world
Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.
There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.
It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale – they are well-equipped to deal with these
You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.
Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably lost.
All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.
Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.
The abbot cleared his throat. “You are all very stupid people,” he told them graciously, “and you do not know anything at all.
CHORONZON “I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, Gods, worlds… of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?”MORPHEUS “I am hope.
We’ve had our ups and downs since then, but that’s what families have, ups and downs.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.
The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.
There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
Before that no one thought of us as colored-foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.
You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.
As sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.
Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time.
Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.
In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.
Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.
Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.
I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies…
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths
I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.
You know I love you,’ said the other mother flatly.’You have a very funny way of showing it,’ said Coraline.
Can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that’s the best possible lie because it may even be true.
Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
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 over.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.
You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.
But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.
You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless…as everything created has an end.
He is holding a book.Inside the book is the Universe.
Walk any path in Destiny’s garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.
And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.
If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.
Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.
Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.
It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.
Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I’ve known dead men talk more than you do.
Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.
You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.
I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t
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.
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 on for ever, if both parties are willing.
They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.
I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.
That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.
You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly… But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar… Ask yourselves, all of you… What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?
I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?
But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there.
Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing them to as well?””No.
Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
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.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.The two are rarely compatible.
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 everything.
Hasn’t there always been a moon?””Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky–it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue…
Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify.”“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.
This is a roadside attraction,’ said Wednesday. ‘One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.
Yes, you’re right. It’s part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.ü
Yes, you’re right. It’s part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.
It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having.
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.
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 au
To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.
In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, “I hope you know what you are doing.””Of course I do,” said Thor. But he didn’t. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.
It’s astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.” -Destruction
No,” said the cat. “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.
Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.
But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream… But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.
And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.
I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love – drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.
I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there’s nothing left to wait for.
[Dream] I do not want a grape.[Desire] I could make you want one.
It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-“things are changing”-what can possibly go wrong?
Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?
Now go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.
She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest.
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 and ashes, and forgot.
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.
Why are we talking about this good and evil? They’re just names for sides. We know that.
She’s as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.
The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard’s bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.
Poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear form, filled with words that could wound with their beauty.
You can’t run away from home without destroying somebody’s world.
Loki’s green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled.
One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.
You know,” he said. “I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.” There was silence, in the high place.
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…
A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now, that’s a question.
Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?
Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.
I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why.
And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know…
What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won’t need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.
Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.
Shadow was a couple of a hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger.
Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.
I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.
I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you
And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.
And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
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 secret there can ever be.
You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.
This book is the book you have just read. It’s done.
The dead can’t hurt you, they’re dead. Living things can hurt you, living people can hurt you but the dead can’t.
What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?””Stories. And they give me hope.
Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.
Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.
People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.
I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.
Because stories start in minds– they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena.
I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I’m writing it down. It’s not true.
We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.
When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories.
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.
We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply…
A grayeyard is not a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy..
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.
Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ‘what kind of tea?
I never fell. I don’t care what they say. I’m still doing my job, as I see it.
Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.
If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art.
I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end.
• They’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.
I think that there should have been some nice wumpires,” said my sister, wistfully. “Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires.””There were not,” said my father.
It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.
I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.
But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Liberty,” boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.
Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.
Will you go back?” asked the Lord of the Gallows. “To America?””Nothing to go back for,” said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie.”Things wait for you there,” said the old man. “But they will wait until you return.
I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats
Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.
I don’t really like driving in the snow. There’s something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It’s like tumbling into a field of stars.
He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick — a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
I doubt I’m any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I’m older. I’ve been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I’ve learned from my mistakes, but I’ve had more time to commit more mistakes.
If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something.
Have you thought about what it means to be a god?” asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. “It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme (…)”.
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn’t it?
Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.
Because,” she said, “when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.
She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.
I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.
Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.
But the truth is, it’s not the idea, it’s never the idea, it’s always what you do wit
Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.
To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.
Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.
Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.
People tend to find books when they are ready for them.
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air–a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.
Remember your name. Do not lose hope —what you seek will be found.
I need to know how you did it it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, witch panache and style. That’s how I did it.(Shadow & Mad Sweeney)
If you’re doing it right… you should feel while you’re doing it that you’re revealing a little too much of yourself.
This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.
A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
You’re playing with fire,” she warned him.”That’s how I know I’m alive.
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. “Calling cats,” it confided, “tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.
She smiled again. “Do you like cat?” she said.”Yes,” said Richard. “I quite like cats.”Anaesthesia looked relieved. “Thigh?” she asked, “or breast?
There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one…
But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.
The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.
Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.
Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: “The song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.
I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.
I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud
He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.
What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don’t you agree?
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.
The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. “What a refreshing mind you have, young man,” he said. “There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
CORALINE’S STORYTHERE WAS A GIRL HER NAME WAS APPLE. SHE USED TO DANCE A LOT. SHE DANCED AND DANCED UNTIL HER FEET TURND INTO SOSSAJES. THE END.
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.
Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face.
What,” asked Mr Croup, “do you want?””What,” asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, “does anyone want?””Dead things,” suggested Mr Vandemar. “Extra teeth.
I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?
The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics-they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.
We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us.” “You’re joking.””Wish I was.
If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?
A plop of rain hit me on the face, one of those early raindrops that turns up five minutes ahead of all the others to let you know it’s time to get indoors.
I’m bored,” she said.”Learn how to tap-dance,” he suggested, without turning around.
Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return…
He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble.Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god.
Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return…
Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.
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.
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.
Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.
Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does … Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.
I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.
I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
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 the next room on his own.
… and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn’t, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of us who died, and everything continued such as before.
I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.
It is a sea of blood. We come from the sea, Tim; our blood is salt, and strange tides ebb and flow within us all.
If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” Liza tells Bod.
…Come home, Bod.’ ‘I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.
Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.
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 entirely.
The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place.
I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall
We have eyes and we have nervesesWe have tails we have teethYou’ll all get what you deservesesWhen we rise from underneath.
We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.
You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.
My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.
Anyone who calls you “little lady” has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.
You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.
I’ll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters.
Biting’s excellent. It’s like kissing – only there is a winner.
There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.
Oh … My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
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.
As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.
I’m a mother,” said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, “and I know what I know.
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place…
Books are really places, make no mistake about that.
So life isn’t exciting?” continued Gary. “Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight. I’ll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?” He turned and looked at Richard.Richard nodded, hesitantly. “Yeah.
Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight.
you do your own time in prison. You don’t do anyone else’s time for them.
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.
The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.
Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman…
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
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.
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.
Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night.
Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night.
Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba
You are not dead, until every person who knew you is dead as well.” Where did I hear that? It doesn’t matter. There is a village in my head.
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.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
people tell you so much more when they know you’re just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are.
Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.
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.
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.
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.
Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.
In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.
I want to write a play. I’d like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
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 stories.