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.

What do stars do? They shine.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually.

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth.