Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.
Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you’ve never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.
I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.
Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.
Goodnight world. While I sleep, I hope you’ll all continue to do whatever it is you do. Unless you murder sleeping authors. Don’t do that.
London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.
Style is made up of whatever an author can’t avoid doing.
Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.
I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it’s taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department.
Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.
I have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do.
I’m never quite sure if I’m me when I’m dressed up.
I do not threaten, I merely advise caution.
Life and death are different sides of the same coin.
In order for stories to work – for kids and for adults – they should scare. And you should triumph. There’s no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn’t scary.
Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.
I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that’s still my agenda.
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you’re a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.