Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.

I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.

My heart… It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it’s trying to escape because it doesn’t belong to me any more. It belongs to you.

Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you... it's like you're betraying yourself.

When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.

The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water." Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.