Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

I would not like it thought that I do not buy my own paperclips, sir. I enjoy owning my own paperclips. It means they are mine.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

I stroll along, talk, I sign books, people buy me drinks, I forget where my hotel is, I get lost and fall into some local body of water... done it hundreds of times.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.

The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West - instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people.