They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.
Any view of things that is not strange, is false.
The converse held reassuringly true: daylight was safe. Daylight was always safe.
Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to Newcastle. For coals.
The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sout with the same tongue.
He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.
One thing I’ve learned: you can know anything, it’s all there, you just have to find it.
Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.
Here, far from our homes, we will be forgotten by our gods.
I never fell. I don’t care what they say. I’m still doing my job, as I see it.
Even the proudest spirit can be broken with love.
Children’s fiction is the most important fiction of all.
I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.
Too soon, the sun will rise.
And he waited. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt like a small forever.
You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.
Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.