We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

It is your differences that make you glorious.

I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight.

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."

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.