She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain by Mr. Neil Gaiman, scrivener, and then doodled, elaborated upon, illustrated, and beaten soundly by Mr. Cris Grimly, etcher and illuminator, featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastiness, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.

This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.