There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

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."

Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.

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.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.