Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.

I am the most unhappy soul alive." "I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls." "Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine.

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.

There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.

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.

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.