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

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?" "Then what died? who are you mourning?" "A point of view.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...'' He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.

What would be the fun in doing things you know are going to work?

I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.