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Everybody Who Has Ever Read Sandman Knows Exactly What The Sandman Looks Like, Which Is More Than Anybody Who Has Ever Read The Catcher In The Rye Can Say About Holden Caufield.

-Neil Gaiman

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Everybody Who Has Ever

Neil Gaiman

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Everybody Who Has Ever Read Sandman Knows Exactly What The Sandman Looks Like, Which Is More Than Anybody Who Has Ever Read The Catcher In The Rye Can Say About Holden Caufield.

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The World Seemed To Shimmer A Little At The Edges.

Google Can Bring You Back 100,000 Answers. A Librarian Can Bring You Back The Right One.

Thought Provoking

I'm A Stranger," Pointed Out Bod. "you're Not," She Said, Definitely. "you're A Little Boy." And Then She Said, "and You're My Friend. So You Can't Be A Stranger.

I Suppose I Could Claim That I Had Suspected That The World Was A Cheap And Shoddy Sham, A Bad Cover For Something Deeper And Weirder And Infinitely More Strange, And That, In Some Way, I Already Know The Truth. But I Think That's Just How The World Has Always Been. And Even Now I Know The Truth, The World Still Seems Cheap And Shoddy. Different World, Different Shoddy, But That's How It Feels.

The Only Thing That Kept Me Going Was Stories. Stories Are Hope. They Take You Out Of Yourself For A Bit, And When You Get Dropped Back In, You're Different- You're Stronger, You've Seen More, You've Felt More. Stories Are Like Spiritual Currency.

Richard Opened His Hand, And The Key Stared Up At Him From His Palm. "by My Crooked Teeth," Asked Richard, Remembering, "who Am I?

Friday's A Free Day. A Woman's Day.

You're No Help," He Told The Lime. This Was Unfair. It Was Only A Lime; There Was Nothing Special About It At All. It Was Doing The Best It Could.

The Greatest Satisfaction You Can Obtain From Life Is Your Pleasure In Producing, In Your Own Individual Way, Something Of Value To Your Fellowmen. That Is Creative Living! For You, Life Can Be A Succession Of Glorious Adventures. Or It Can Be A Monotonous Bore. Take Your Choice!

It Used To Be Thought That The Events That Changed The World Were Things Like Big Bombs, Maniac Politicians, Huge Earthquakes, Or Vast Population Movements, But It Has Now Been Realized That This Is A Very Old-fashioned View Held By People Totally Out Of Touch With Modern Thought. 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.

A Typical National World Weekly Would Tell The World How Jesus' Face Was Seen On A Big Mac Bun Bought By Someone From Des Moines, With An Artist's Impression Of The Bun; How Elvis Presley Was Recently Sighted Working In A Burger Lord In Des Moines; How Listening To Elvis Records Cured A Des Moines Housewife's Cancer; How The Spate Of Werewolves Infesting The Midwest Are The Offspring Of Noble Pioneer Women Raped By Bigfoot; And That Elvis Was Taken By Space Aliens In 1976 Because He Was Too Good For This World. Remarkably, One Of These Stories Is Indeed True.

You Get On With Your Own Life. Lettie Gave It To You. You Just Have To Grow Up And Try And Be Worth It.

It's Always Too Late For Sorries, But I Appreciate The Sentiment.

Words Save Our Lives, Sometimes.

Never A Possession, Always The Possessor, With Skin As Pale As Smoke, And Eyes Tawny And Sharp As Yellow Wine: Desire Is Everything You Have Ever Wanted. Whoever You Are. Whatever You Are. Everything.

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.

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.

I Love Religion. I Could Make Up Religions All Day. I Sort Of Think That In An Ideal World I'd Like To Be A Religion Designer. I'd Like People Come Up To Me And Say, I Need A Religion. I'd Go Talk To Them For A While, And I'd Design A Religion For Them. That Would Be A Great Job. There's A Need For People Like That. Fortunately, Seeing That One Can't Actually Do It, I Get Paid For Sort Of Making Them Up Anyway.

It Begins, As Most Things Begin, With A Song.

As We Age, We Become Our Parents; Live Long Enough And We See Faces Repeat In Time.

He Was Alone In The Darkness Once More, But The Darkness Became Brighter And Brighter Until It Was Burning Like The Sun.

That Which Is Dreamed Can Never Be Lost, Can Never Be Undreamed.

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.

You're Sick. Sick And Evil And Weird.

Take What You Have Learned, And Move On.

Nobody's Seen Jesus In Years.

The Future Came And Went In The Mildly Discouraging Way That Futures Do.

This Is How You Can Tell A Real Photographer: Mostly, A Real Photographer Does Not Say 'i Wish I Had My Camera On Me Right Now'. Instead A Real Photographer Pulls Out Her Camera And Takes The Photograph.

All Bookshelves Are Magical.

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.

This Is The Only Country In The World, That Worries About What It Is. The Rest Of Them Know What They Are. No One Ever Needs To Go Searching For The Heart Of Norway. Or Looks For The Soul Of Mozambique. They Know What They Are.

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.

The Best Thing About Doing A Signing Tour Is That Numbers Become Faces. I Got To Sign Books For Six Or Seven Thousand People, All Of Whom Were Dreadfully Nice. Everything Else, The Interviews, The Hotels, The Plane Travel, The Best-seller Lists, Even The Sushi, Gets Old Awfully Fast. Well, Maybe Not The Sushi.

There Was A Hand In The Darkness, And It Held A Knife.

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.

This Is Not A Place, After All. It Is Between Places. This Is Nowhere. A Brief Thought: I Could Stay Here, Abandon My Quest, Hang Forever In The Void, Safe And Cold And Alone.

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.

Open Relationship

Never Mind. There. For Good Or Bad. It's Done.

Every Now And Then I'll Do Little Things, A Short Story Or Something, That Doesn't Have Any Fantastical Elements, But Mostly I Like The Power Of Playing God And I Like To Imagine Things.

When I Started Out, There Were A Lot Of Things I Knew I Couldn't Do, And A Lot Of Things I Only Found Out I Couldn't Do By Going And Doing It. And No-one Was Watching, And Nobody Cared.

I Like Reading. I Prefer Not Reading On My Computer, Because That Makes Whatever I Am Reading Feel Like Work. I Do Not Mind Reading On My Ipad.

Nobody's American," Said Wednesday. "not Originally. That's My Point.

The Names Are The First Things To Go, After The Breath Has Gone, And The Beating Of The Heart. We Keep Our Memories Longer Than Our Names.

People Talk About Escapism As If It's A Bad Thing... Once You've Escaped, Once You Come Back, The World Is Not The Same As When You Left It. You Come Back To It With Skills, Weapons, Knowledge You Didn't Have Before. Then You Are Better Equipped To Deal With Your Current Reality.

Leave No Path Untaken.

All Your Tomorrows Start Here.

I'm A Fairly Undisciplined Writer.

We Wrapped Our Dreams In Words And Patterned The Words So That They Would Live Forever, Unforgettable.

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.

It Does Not Matter Where You Come From, If You Walk Toward The Truth You Will Reach It, Whatever Path You Take.

Sometimes I Suspect That We Build Our Traps Ourselves, Then We Back Into Them, Pretending Amazement The While.

Remember: That Giants Sleep Too Soundly; That Witches Are Often Betrayed By Their Appetites; Dragons Have One Soft Spot, Somewhere, Always; Hearts Can Be Well-hidden, And You Can Betray Them With Your Tongue. (from "instructions")

Make Your Mistakes, Next Year And Forever.

He Was Having More Fun Than A Barrelful Of Monkeys.* *several Years Earlier Spider Had Actually Been Tremendously Disappointed By A Barrelful Of Monkeys. It Had Done Nothing He Had Considered Particularly Entertaining, Apart From Emit Interesting Noises, And Eventually, Once The Noises Had Stopped And The Monkeys Were No Longer Doing Anything At All—except Possibly On An Organic Level—had Needed To Be Disposed Of In The Dead Of Night.

The Moonlight Was Enough. It Would Do.

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.

When I Was Young I Was A Fool. So Wrap Me Up In Dreams And Death.

If You Have Something Specific And Visible To Fear, Rather Than Something That Could Be Anything, It Is Easier.

It Seemed To Coraline That It Was Crouching, And Staring Down At Her, As If It Were Not Really A House But Only The Idea Of A House—and The Person Who Had Had The Idea, She Was Certain, Was Not A Good Person.

The Trouble With Everything, These Days, For Me, Is Time. There Is Only One Me. There Are A Ridiculous Number Of Demands On My Time. There Are So Many Things I'm Trying To Do. It's So Much More About When I'm Going To Get Time To Do It, If I Get Time.

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?

I'm Sure There's An Alternate Universe Where I Got To Become A Pulpy Science Fiction Writer.

Science Fiction

Fiction Writers

I Believe That Mankind's Destiny Lies In The Stars.

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.

In The Case Of 'ocean At The End Of The Lane,' It's A Book About Helplessness. It's A Book About Family, It's A Book About Being 7 In A World Of People Who Are Bigger Than You, And More Dangerous, And Stepping Into Territory That You Don't Entirely Understand.

You Think You're Being Given All Of These Things: Phones That Can Communicate With Other Devices, Car Service That's Better Than A Taxi, All Of These Amazing Things That Are Available To You At Any Time. It Isn't Until You've Swum Across The River That You Can Start To See The Negative Aspects Of It All.

Rule One Of Reading Other People's Stories Is That Whenever You Say 'well That's Not Convincing' The Author Tells You That's The Bit That Wasn't Made Up. This Is Because Real Life Is Under No Obligation To Be Convincing.

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.

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.

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: Something That Lives Forever In People's Minds, Like The Tune Of A Nursery Rhyme. It Means That Everyone Gets To Re-create You In Their Own Minds. You Barely Have Your Own Identity Any More. Instead, You're A Thousand Aspects Of What People Need You To Be. And Everyone Wants Something Different From You. Nothing Is Fixed, Nothing Is Stable.

Some Of The Things Are The Same No Matter Which World You're In, Kid. One Of 'em Is This: The Quickest Way Out Of Something Is Usually Straight Through It.

As For Thinking Time Versus Writing Time, Well, That's Up To You. But - And I Wish It Were Otherwise - Books Don't Get Written By Thinking About Them, They Get Written By Writing Them. And That's When You Make Discoveries About What You're Writing. That's When You Get The Happy Accidents.

Idris: Are All People Like This? The Doctor: Like What? Idris: So Much Bigger On The Inside.

Genre Fiction, As Terry Pratchett Has Pointed Out, Is A Stew. You Take Stuff Out Of The Pot, You Put Stuff Back. The Stew Bubbles On.

I'm Never, I Hope, Stupid Enough To Believe That Twitter Or Blogging Or Any Of This Stuff Is A Substitute For Actually Doing The Work Or Writing A Book.

And Then It Went, And Time Passed Properly Once More, Every Second Following Every Other Second Just Like They're Meant To.

Every Lover Is, In His Heart, A Madman, And, In His Head, A Minstrel.

I Only Have Two Kinds Of Dreams: The Bad And The Terrible. Bad Dreams I Can Cope With. They're Just Nightmares, And The End Eventually. I Wake Up. The Terrible Dreams Are The Good Dreams. In My Terrible Dreams, Everything Is Fine. I Am Still With The Company. I Still Look Like Me. None Of The Last Five Years Ever Happened. Sometimes I'm Married. Once I Even Had Kids. I Even Knew Their Names. Everything's Wonderful And Normal And Fine. And Then I Wake Up, And I'm Still Me. And I'm Still Here. And That Is Truly Terrible.

You Know, I'm Normally So Sanguine. But... Being Accused Of Rushing These Two Books Out To Cash In On The Newbery Medal, Without Access To Time Travel Equipment Or Anything, Just Makes Me Want To Bang My Forehead Gently Against A Tree For Half An Hour. Is It Too Much To Ask People To Think?

I Think You're Doing Better Than You Were The Last Time We Saw You. You're Growing A New Heart, For A Start.

Parameters Are The Things You Bounce Off To Create Art.

I Realized The Other Day That About The Only Author I Genuinely Read For Pure Pleasure Is One Of The Worst Authors In The World, A Guy Called Harry Stephen Keeler, A Long Dead American Mystery Writer. He Was Probably The Greatest Bad Writer America Ever Produced.

As A Teenager I Wrote To R.a. Lafferty. And He Responded, Too, With Letters That Were Like R.a. Lafferty Short Stories, Filled With Elliptical Answers To Straight Questions And Simple Answers To Complicated Ones.

You Are Young, And In Love. Every Young Man In Your Position Is The Most Miserable Young Man Who Ever Lived.

Miserable Person

I Miss You', He Admitted. 'i'm Here', She Said. 'that's When I Miss You Most. When You're Here. When You Aren't Here, When You're Just A Ghost Of The Past Or A Dream From Another Life, It's Easier Then.

Even The Proudest Spirit Can Be Broken With Love.

Writing, And Especially Writing A Novel, Where You Get To Sit In A Room By Yourself With Either A Pen And A Paper Or A Computer For A Couple Of Years, Is A Very Solitary Occupation. You Can Read Sales Figures - A Hundred Thousand Books Sold, Half A Million Books Sold - But They Are Just Numbers.

It's Certainly Not Too Late To Change To The Winning Side. But You Know, You Also Have The Freedom To Stay Just Where You Are. That's What It Means To Be An American. That's The Miracle Of America. Freedom To Believe Means The Freedom To Believe The Wrong Thing, After All. Just As Freedom Of Speech Gives You The Right To Stay Silent.

Picking One Of Your Favorite Creation Or Character Is Like Picking The Best One Of Your Children! I'm Not Sure It Really Works. My Very Favorite Characters Tend To Be Ones I Can Go Back To And Look At, And Have No Idea How They Popped Out Of My Head.

I Am Frightened Of Nothing." "nothing?" "nothing." "are You Extremely Frightened Of Nothing?" "absolutely Terrified Of It." "i Have Nothing In My Pockets. Would You Like To See It?" "no, I Most Definitely Would Not.

When I Was A Kid, We Actually Lived In A House That Had Been Divided In Two At One Point, Which Meant That One Room In Our House Opened Up Onto A Brick Wall. And I Was Convinced All I Had To Do Was Just Open It The Right Way And It Wouldn't Be A Brick Wall. So I'd Sidle Over To The Door And I'd Pull It Open.

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.

I Remembered That, And, Remembering That, I Remembered Everything.

The House Smelled Musty And Damp, And A Little Sweet, As If It Were Haunted By The Ghosts Of Long-dead Cookies.

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.

Death Is The Second Oldest Of The Endless. It's Hard Not To Love Her. She Loves You, After All.

My Parents Would Frisk Me Before Family Events, And Find The Book, And Lock It In The Car. And Then Be Disappointed Where, Somewhere At The Event, I Would Find A Book And Sit Under A Table Where Nobody Could Get Me And Go Back Into Book Land.

I Want To Go Home. Then He Mentally Underlined The Last Sentence Three Times, Rewrote It In Huge Letters In Red Ink, And Circled It Before Putting A Number Of Exclamation Marks Next To It In His Mental Margin.

Exclamation Marks

I Enjoy Writing Scripts. I Can Find Out What Happens. With An Outline, I Feel Like I'm Doing An Architectural Diagram Of Something.

You Wouldn't Die In Here, Nothing Ever Dies In Here, But If You Stayed Here For Too Long, After A While Just A Little Of You Would Exist Everywhere, All Spread Out. And That's Not A Good Thing. Never Enough Of You All Together In One Place, So T Here Wouldn't Be Anything Left That Would Think Of Itself As An 'i.' No Point Of View Any Longer, Because You'd Be An Infinite Sequence Of Views And Of Points.

It’s Part Of Growing Up, I Suppose…you Always Have To Leave Something Behind You.

It's Only A World, After All, And They're Just Sand Grains In The Desert, Worlds.

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 Assumes That Everything Will, Somehow Or Other, Work Out For The Best.

Mr. Vandemar Showed Them His Teeth, Demonstrating His Sunny And Delightful Disposition. It Was Unquestionably The Most Horrible Thing Richard Had Ever Seen.

Whatever It Takes To Finish Things, Finish. You Will Learn More From A Glorious Failure Than You Ever Will From Something You Never Finished.

Whatever It Takes

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.

In A Novel, You Can Always Go Back And Make It Look Like You Knew What You Were Doing All Along Before The Thing Goes Out And Gets Published.

I Don't Think I'm Mainstream. I Think What I Am Is Lots And Lots Of Different Cults. And When You Get Lots And Lots Of Small Groups Who Like You A Lot, They Add Up To A Big Group Without Ever Actually Becoming Mainstream.

Shadow Looked Down At The Girl On The Table. “what Happened To Her?” He Asked. “poor Taste In Boyfriends,” Said Jacquel. “it’s Not Always Fatal.

[d]on't Ever Apologize To An Author For Buying Something In Paperback, Or Taking It Out From A Library (that's What They're There For. Use Your Library). Don't Apologize To This Author For Buying Books Second Hand, Or Getting Them From Bookcrossing Or Borrowing A Friend's Copy. What's Important To Me Is That People Read The Books And Enjoy Them, And That, At Some Point In There, The Book Was Bought By Someone. And That People Who Like Things, Tell Other People. The Most Important Thing Is That People Read.

If You Don't Know It's Impossible It's Easier To Do.

You Can Buy A Book New, Buy It In Hardback Or Wait For The Paperback, Find It Used Or As A Collectible. I Don't Mind. What I Care About Most Is That People Are Reading.

They Kissed For The First Time Then In The Cold Spring Rain, Though Neither One Of Them Now Knew That It Was Raining. Tristran's Heart Pounded In His Chest As If It Was Not Big Enough To Contain All The Joy That It Held. He Opened His Eyes As He Kissed The Star. Her Sky-blue Eyes Stared Back Into His, And In Her Eyes He Could See No Parting From Her.

Have You Ever Spent Days And Days And Days Making Up Flavors Of Ice Cream That No One's Ever Eaten Before? Like Chicken And Telepone Ice Cream? Green Mouse Ice Cream Was The Worst. I Didn't Like That At All.

We Build A Shell Around It, Like An Oyster Dealing With A Painful Particle Of Grit, Coating It With Smooth Pearl Layers In Order To Cope. This Is How We Walk And Talk And Function , Day In, Day Out. Immune To Others’ Pain And Loss.

Crowley Had Been Extremely Impressed With The Warranties Offered By The Computer Industry, And Had In Fact Sent A Bundle Below To The Department That Drew Up The Immortal Soul Agreements, With A Yellow Memo Form Attached Just Saying: "learn, Guys..."

He Wondered Whether Home Was A Thing That Happened To A Place After A While, Or If It Was Something That You Found In The End, If You Simply Walked And Waited And Willed It Long Enough.

I Loved The Fact That I Was Suddenly No Longer Dependent On Whether A Store Took Out An Ad In The Right Place, Or On The Word On The Street.

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.

As A Journalist, I Would Talk To Writers, Directors, Creative People, And Discover That For An Awful Lot Of Them, The Moment They Became Successful, That Was All They Were Allowed To Do. So You End Up Talking To The Bestselling Science-fiction Author Who Wrote A Historical-fiction Novel That Everybody Loved, But No One Would Publish.

The Real Problem With Stories - If You Keep Them Going Long Enough, They Always End In Death.

In Ten Years Time I’ll Be… (dead) Sixty.

She's Not Dead. You Didn't Kill Her, Nor Did The Hunger Birds, Although They Did Their Best To Get To You Through Her. She's Been Given Her Ocean. One Day, In Its Own Time, The Ocean Will Give Her Back.i Thought Of Corpses And Of Skeletons With Pearls For Eyes. I Thought Of Mermaids With Tails That Flicked When They Moved, Like My Goldfishes' Tails Had Flicked Before My Goldfish Had Stopped Moving, To Lie, Belly Up, Like Lettie, On The Top Of The Water. I Said, 'will She Be The Same?

And Because Nobody's Done It Before, They Haven't Made Up Rules To Stop Anyone Doing That Again, Yet.

Rock And Roll Stars Have It Much Better Than Writers When They're On A Tour.

There Was Only One Guy In The Whole Bible Jesus Ever Personally Promised A Place With Him In Paradise. Not Peter, Not Paul, Not Any Of Those Guys. He Was A Convicted Thief, Being Executed. So Don't Knock The Guys On Death Row. Maybe They Know Something You Don't.

October Knew, Of Course, That The Action Of Turning A Page, Of Ending A Chapter Or Of Shutting A Book, Did Not End A Tale. Having Admitted That, He Would Also Avow That Happy Endings Were Never Difficult To Find: "it Is Simply A Matter," He Explained To April, "of Finding A Sunny Place In A Garden, Where The Light Is Golden And The Grass Is Soft; Somewhere To Rest, To Stop Reading, And To Be Content.

And If There's A Moral There, I Don't Know What It Is, Save Maybe That We Should Take Our Goodbyes Whenever We Can.

I Came To The Conclusion That In Comedy, Everybody Gets What They Need, Whereas In Horror, Everybody Gets What They Deserve. I Decided That At The End Of The Day, I Was Going To Give Everybody What They Needed.

The End Of The Day

Hearts May Break, But Hearts Are The Toughest Of Muscles, Able To Pump For A Lifetime, Seventy Times A Minute, And Scarcely Falter Along The Way. Even Dreams, The Most Delicate And Intangible Of Things, Can Prove Remarkably Difficult To Kill.

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.

I Don't Necessarily Think Stories Have Functions Any More Than Diamonds Have Functions, Or The Sky Has A Function... Stories Exist. They Keep Us Sane, I Think. We Tell Each Other Stories, We Believe Stories. I Love Watching The Slow Rise Of The Urban Legend. They're The Stories That We Use To Explain Ourselves To Ourselves.

On The First Day Coraline's Family Moved In, Miss Spink And Miss Forcible Made A Point Of Telling Coraline How Dangerous The Well Was, And They Warned Her To Be Sure She Kept Away From It. So Coraline Set Off To Explore For It, So That She Knew Where It Was, To Keep Away From It Properly.

There's Not Much High And Low Culture Any More: There's Just Mingling Streams Of Art And What Matters Is Whether It's Good Art Or Bad Art.

The Secret To Writing Is Just To Write. Write Every Day. Never Stop Writing. Write On Every Surface You See; Write On People On The Street. When The Cops Come To Arrest You, Write On The Cops. Write On The Police Car. Write On The Judge. I'm In Jail Forever Now, And The Prison Cell Walls Are Completely Covered With My Writing, And I Keep Writing On The Writing I Wrote. That's My Method.

I Believe That All Men Are Just Overgrown Boys With Deep Problems Communicating.

Do The Stuff That Only You Can Do. The Urge, Starting Out, Is To Copy. And That's Not A Bad Thing. Most Of Us Only Find Our Own Voices After We've Sounded Like A Lot Of Other People. But 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 Can. The Moment That You Feel That, Just Possibly, You're Walking Down The Street Naked, Exposing Too Much Of Your Heart And Your Mind And What Exists On The Inside, Showing Too Much Of Yourself. That's The Moment You May Be Starting To Get It Right.

Stories Are Made Up By People Who Make Them Up. If They Work, They Get Retold. There's The Magic Of It.

It Has Been Said That Civilization Is Twenty-four Hours And Two Meals Away From Barbarism.

And I Thought, Eight Years Ago, When I Began Carefully Charting The Progress Of American Gods, Nervously Dipping My Toes Into The Waters Of Blogging, Would I Have Imagined A Future In Which, Instead Of Recording The Vicissitudes Of Bringing A Book Into The World, I Would Be Writing About Not-even-interestingly Missing Cups Of Cold Camomile Tea? And I Thought, Yup. Sounds About Right. Happy Eighth Birthday, Blog.

I Hope You Read Some Fine Books And Kiss Someone Who Thinks You're Wonderful.

I Had Started To Feel That Somewhere In The Second Half Of The 20th Century, The Idea Of Page-turning As A Good Thing Had Been Lost. You Were Getting Books That Were The Equivalent Of Absolutely Beautifully Prepared Dishes Of Food That Didn't Taste Like Anything Much.

Adults Should Not Weep, I Knew. They Did Not Have Mothers Who Would Comfort Them.

Firstly, There No Such Person As Death. Second, Death's This Tall Guy With A Bone Face, Like A Skeletal Monk, With A Scythe And An Hourglass And A Big White Horse And A Penchant For Playing Chess With Scandinavians. Third, He Doesn't Exist Either.

The Cat Looked As If It Were About To Say Something Sarcastic. Then It Flicked Its Whiskers And Said, "challenge Her. There's No Guarantee She'll Play Fair, But Her Kind Of Thing Loves Games And Challenges.

We Are Always Living In The Final Days. What Have You Got? A Hundred Years Or Much, Much Less Until The End Of Your World.

There Is Something About Riding A Unicorn, For Those People Who Still Can, Which Is Unlike Any Other Experience: Exhilarating, And Intoxicating, And Fine.

For Me, Closing Libraries Is The Equivalent Of Eating Your Seed Corn To Save A Little Money.

Soon,” Said The Crackling Voice Of The Flame, Coming From Behind Him, “they Will Fall. Soon They Will Fall And The Star People Will Meet The Earth People. There Will Be Heroes Among Them, And Men Who Will Slay Monsters And Bring Knowledge, But None Of Them Will Be Gods. This Is A Poor Place For Gods.

If You Go To Space, You'll Look Down And See No National Boundaries. You'll Never See The Gods People Are Killing Each Other Over, But They're Incredibly Real.

I Don't Just Randomly Kill People... I Kill People When It's Funny.

We Look About In Puzzlement At Our World, With A Sense Of Unease And Disquiet. We Think Of Ourselves As Scholars In Arcane Liturgies, Single Men Trapped In Worlds Beyond Our Devising. The Truth Is Far Simpler: There Are Things In The Darkness Beneath Us That Wish Us Harm.

It Is Astonishing Just How Much Of What We Are Can Be Tied To The Beds We Wake Up In In The Morning, And It Is Astonishing How Fragile That Can Be.

There's A Tale In The Caballa That Suggests That The Angel Of Death Is So Beautiful That Upon Seeing It (or Him, Or Her) You Fall In Love So Hard, So Fast, That Your Soul Is Pulled Out Through Your Eyes. I Like That Story.

Falling In Love

All Writers Have This Vague Hope That The Elves Will Come In The Night And Finish Any Stories.

It’s Easier To Kill People, When You’re Dead Yourself. I Mean, It’s Not Such A Big Deal. You’re Not So Prejudiced Any More.

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.

A God's Relationship To The World, Even A World In Which He Was Walking, Was About As Emotionally Connected As That Of A Computer Gamer Playing With Knowledge Of The Overall Shape Of The Game And Armed With A Complete Set Of Cheat Codes.

I Found English To Be A Sort Of Thomas Hardy Aversion Therapy.

Television And Cinema Were All Very Well, But These Stories Happened To Other People. The Stories I Found In Books Happened Inside My Head. I Was, In Some Way, There. It's The Magic Of Fiction: You Take The Words And You Build Them Into Worlds.

People Who Believe They'll Be Happy If They Go And Live Somewhere Else, Learn It Doesn't Work That Way. Wherever You Go, You Take Yourself With You.

Nobody Will Ever Hurt Her. She’ll Just Smile Her Faint Vague Wonderful Smile And Walk Away.

Loyalty Was A Great Thing, But No Lieutenants Should Be Forced To Choose Between Their Leader And A Circus With Elephants.

Someone Killed My Mother And My Father And My Sister?" "yes, Someone Did." "a Man?" "a Man." "which Means," Said Bod, "you're Asking The Wrong Question." Silas Raised An Eyebrow. "how So?" "well," Said Bod. "if I Go Outside In The World, The Question Isn't Who Will Keep Me Safe From Him?" "no?" "no. It's Who Will Keep Him Safe From Me?

Writing Fiction Is Not A Profession That Leaves One Well-disposed Toward Reading Fiction. One Starts Out Loving Books And Stories, And Then One Becomes Jaded And Increasingly Hard To Please. I Read Less And Less Fiction These Days, Finding The Buzz And The Joy I Used To Get From Fiction In Ever Stranger Works Of Non-fiction, Or Poetry.

I Liked Myths. They Weren't Adult Stories And They Weren't Children's Stories. They Were Better Than That. They Just Were.

Names Come And Names Go.

If People Are Standing Up There Saying, My Football Team Just Won With Help From God, Then Obviously God Just Pissed Over The Other Team.

Put One Word After Another. Find The Right Word, Put It Down.

There May Be A Parallel Between Woodcuts And Radio; Radio Plays Are A Living Art Form Everywhere Except The Usa.

A Good Writer Should Be Able To Write Comedic Work That Made You Laugh, And Scary Stuff That Made You Scared, And Fantasy Or Science Fiction That Imbued You With A Sense Of Wonder, And Mainstream Journalism That Gave You Clear And Concise Information In A Way That You Wanted It.

A Flash Of Resentment. 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...if Not Died, Then Having Given Up Her Life. It Wasn't Fair. "life's Not Fair," Said Ginnie, As If I Had Spoken Aloud.

People Seem To Think That They Can't Come Up With Ideas, And They're Wrong. They Can And They Do, But They Just Think Of It As Daydreaming, Or Wasting Time. Kids Get Told Not To Make Things Up, And In My Case, Nobody Told Me Long Enough, Or It Just Didn't Stick.

The Really Important Thing To Be Was Yourself, Just As Hard As You Could.

Important Things

Anywhere That I Can't Check My Email Is A Good Place To Write!

Books Are Special, Books Are The Way We Talk To Generations That Have Not Turned Up Yet. The Fact That We Can Actually, Essentially Communicate With The People In Ancient Egypt, People In Rome And Greece, People In Ancient Britain, People In New York In The 1920s Who Can Communicate To Us And Change The Way We Think, And Change The Things That We Believe. I Think That Books Are Special. Books Are Sacred. And I Think That When You Are Selling Books, You Have To Remember That In All The Profits And Loss, In All Of That, You Are Treading On Sacred Ground.

Tomorrow May Be Hell, But Today Was A Good Writing Day, And On The Good Writing Days Nothing Else Matters.

My Heart… It Feels Like My Chest Can Barely Contain It. Like It’s Trying To Escape Because It Doesn’t Belong To Me Any More. It Belongs To You.

Even Nothing Cannot Last Forever.

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.

With 'stardust', I Hope What I Was Doing Is Giving 30-year-olds And 40-year-olds And 25-year-olds And 60-year-olds A Chance To Get The Same Sense Of Wonder, The Same Feeling, The Same Magic, That They Got In Reading The Classic Fairy Tales As Children.

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.

Most People Don't Realize How Important Librarians Are. I Ran Across A Book Recently Which Suggested That The Peace And Prosperity Of A Culture Was Solely Related To How Many Librarians It Contained. Possibly A Slight Overstatement. But A Culture That Doesn't Value Its Librarians Doesn't Value Ideas And Without Ideas, Well, Where Are We?

Life - And I Don't Suppose I'm The First To Make This Comparison - Is A Disease: Sexually Transmitted, And Invariably Fatal.

If You Were Close Enough To Her Ruby-red Lips You Would Hear Her Say, 'i Will Rise Now And Go About The City In The Streets, And In The Broad Ways I Will Seek The One I Love.' She Is Whispering That, And She Whispers, 'by Night On My Bed I Sought Him Whom My Soul Loveth. Let Him Kiss Me With The Kisses Of His Mouth. My Beloved Is Mine And I Am His.

You Have To Finish Things - That's What You Learn From, You Learn By Finishing Things.

I Have No Plans To Love You," Said Coraline. "no Matter What. You Can't Make Me Love You.

Perfection Is Like Chasing The Horizon. Keep Moving.

Love Me When I Least Deserve It, Because That’s When I Really Need It.

'doctor Who' Was The First Mythology That I Learned, Before Ever I Ran Into Greek Or Roman Or Egyptian Mythologies.

Discontent Is A Good Thing: Discontented People Can Modify And Improve Their Worlds, Leave Them Better, Leave Them Different.

If You Are Protected From Dark Things Then You Have No Protection Of, Knowledge Of, Or Understanding Of Dark Things When They Show Up.

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.

It's Not Irrelevant, Those Moments Of Connection, Those Places Where Fiction Saves Your Life. It's The Most Important Thing There Is.

You Attend The Funeral, You Bid The Dead Farewell. You Grieve. Then You Continue With Your Life. And At Times The Fact Of Her Absence Will Hit You Like A Blow To The Chest, And You Will Weep. But This Will Happen Less And Less As Time Goes On. She Is Dead. You Are Alive. So Live.

I Would Read. I Would Explore

But How Can You Walk Away From Something And Still Come Back To It?" "easy," Said The Cat. "think Of Somebody Walking Around The World. You Start Out Walking Away From Something And End Up Coming Back To It." "small World," Said Coraline. "it's Big Enough For Her," Said The Cat. "spiders' Webs Only Have To Be Large Enough To Catch Flies." Coraline Shivered.

She Took My Hands In Her, Then, And Squeezed Them. 'but You Stayed Where You Were Meant To Be, And You Didn't Listen To Them. Well Done. That's Quality, That Is,' And She Sounded Proud. In That Moment I Forgot My Hunger And I Forgot My Fear.

The Doctor: Sorry, Do You Have A Name? Idris: Seven Hundred Years And Finally He Asks. The Doctor: But What Do I Call You? Idris: I Think You Call Me... Sexy? The Doctor: [embarrassed] Only When We're Alone. Idris: We Are Alone. The Doctor: Oh. Come On Then, Sexy.

I've Been Making A List Of The Things They Don't Teach You At School. They Don't Teach You How To Love Somebody. They Don't Teach You How To Be Famous. They Don't Teach You How To Be Rich Or How To Be Poor. They Don't Teach You How To Walk Away From Someone You Don't Love Any Longer. They Don't Teach You How To Know What's Going On In Someone Else's Mind. They Don't Teach You What To Say To Someone Who's Dying. They Don't Teach You Anything Worth Knowing.

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Shane Claiborne

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