Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

Delirium: 'What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?' Dream: 'There isn't one.' Delirium: 'Oh. I thought maybe there was.'

There was a hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.