People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.
Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.
Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.
If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.
Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I’m not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head.
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.
While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe.
Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.
The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It’s a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.
I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I’d get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I’d love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn’t taste of anything else.
There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.
I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.
Even nothing cannot last forever.
We owe it to each other to tell stories.