Quote collection
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"Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."
"You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies."
"While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe."
"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."
"I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area."
"Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience."
"It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is."
"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
"All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories."
"Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week."
"Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right."
"Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it."
"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."
"I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage."
"Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth."
"Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans."
"I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all."
"Books were safer than other people anyway."
"The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming."
"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song."