The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will take a graveyard.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.