People who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Something feels weird," he told Laura. That wasn't the first thing he said to her. The first thing was "I love you," because it's a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did.

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.