Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.
Were you listening to a word I said ' 'I kind of switched off when you drew breath.
The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.
If you give children the freedom to do very little, quite a lot will do very little.
Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.
Don't move," said Sprockett."Mimes don't generally attack unless they are threatened.
Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.
If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.
There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says...it's payback time!
He was, after all, the ultimate rebel -- it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus.
I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.
Do I have to talk to insane people?" "You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.
True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good - and we all know how rare that is.
I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
Speak to any editor and ask them what they turned down, and they'll have long lists of books.
If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad.
Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
I'm not of the opinion that the next logical step for a book is for it to be made into a film.
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.
Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.
It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent - it took me that long to start writing good.
There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.
Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.
I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.
Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.
Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.
If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.
People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.
I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.
When I was about 10 or 11, I realised that people made movies; until then, I had thought they just happened.
Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.
Cats aren't really friendly, they're just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.
What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?” “I don’t know—avant verrais?
I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!
When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.
So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix.
I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.
How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.
I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.
...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.
Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.
I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.
There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.
Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.
Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.
...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.
I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.