Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There's always a piece of them in your heart.
I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you've done something.
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.
I wanted to be an author as far back as I can remember, mixed with occasional bouts of wanting to be a werewolf when I grew up. But mostly, when I daydreamed, it was about being an author.
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.
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.
She found herself to be quite worried that something would jump out at her, so she began to whistle. She thought it might make it harder for things to jump out at her, if she was whistling.
Are you scared?’ asked Mr. Ibis. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.
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?
HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY. And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn't suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain.
If ever you get to be my age," said the old woman, "you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run.
It's just I might get distracted, and I get lost kind of easily, and sometimes I have really bad days...when, you know, I just want to hide or scream or bleed or something, and...all that...
I'm willing to make a fool out of myself in public. I'm also willing to make those mistakes that you're going to make the first time you go out, so hopefully the next time it will be better.
The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.
People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange
It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.
There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.
Tristan and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while
My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
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.
Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."
Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.
Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.
However you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot.
You're a big one,[...] a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don't look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.
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 took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.
You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else.
The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.
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.
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.
I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.
It's quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.' 'No radio waves,' said the Doctor. 'Not even Radio Four.' 'You can hear radio waves?' 'Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,' he said unconvincingly.
If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.
A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
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')
I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.
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.
One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.
One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.
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.
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
She didn't have a daddy?" I asked. "No." "Did you have a daddy?" "You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.
I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.
I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.
One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.
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.