I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you're waiting for someone to publish the first thing.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.

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.

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.