I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear. Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

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.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.

It's like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.

Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows: "So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us." "And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy] "Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?" "It's lucky," said Kandar. Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced. "Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply.