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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”

“Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.”

“Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.”

“Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.”

“The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.”

“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.”