“What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?”

“It begins, as most things begin, with a song.”

“Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.”

“Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island”

“Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”

“Of course it was Loki. It's always Loki.”

“The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.”

“She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”

“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.”

“Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.”

“The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”

“I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in betweens.”

“Can I help you?" said the footman. Richard had been told to fuck off and die with more warmth and good humor.”

“It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.”

“Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes... ”

“Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.”

“And he waited. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt like a small forever.”

“Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.”

“He said nothing: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes.”

“People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.”

“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.”

“The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.”

“It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is”

“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.”

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”

“What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"

“There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.”

“Mind the gap!”

“You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

“We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.”

“If you were to try and pick him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your eye slipped over.”

“Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.”

“I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”

“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.”

“And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.”

“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.”

“What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.”

“I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.”

“It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.”

“Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”

“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.”

“I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.”

“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.”

“People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”

“Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.”

“There was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“It won't hurt, said her other father. Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head.”

“You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door.”

“You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

“I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.”