Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

I do not threaten, I merely advise caution.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all.

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.