There’s none so blind…as those who will not listen.

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved.

Gods are great but the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return.

Waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.

Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style.

Freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgotten.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Writer advice…Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot and outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.

Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.

You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

Oh, monsters are scared, said Lettie. That’s why they’re monsters.

Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

There’s not much high and low culture any more: there’s just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it’s good art or bad art.

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.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Know safely what the rules are, and then break them with joy.

I think that the joy of world building in fiction is honestly the joy of getting to play God. Because as an author, you get to build the world.

People ask me, ‘How do you cope with rejection?’… And there are only two ways to do it—one of which is you go down. You get sad. You put the thing away. You stop writing. You go and get a real job, go and do something else. And the other is a kind of crazed attitude that actually the most important thing now is to write something so brilliant, so powerful, so good nobody could ever reject it.

You always have to remember, when people tell you that something doesn’t work for them, that they’re right. It doesn’t work for them. And that is incredibly important information. You also have to remember that when people tell you what they think is wrong and how you should fix it, that they’re almost always wrong.

If you get stuck, you can ask yourself what your characters want—and that is like a flashlight. It shines a light on the road ahead and lets you move forward. It’s the only question that opens the door to ‘What do you do next?

Dialogue is character. The way that somebody talks, what they say, how they say it is character. And dialogue has to show character. It also has to show plot. And maybe it can be funny along the way.

A lot of what you do in world building is you do your homework. You do your research. Go on walks. See things. All of that—and then take notes.

You may need to write about types of people who you do not know.

You learn more from finishing a failure than you do from writing a success.

And then what happened?’ Those words, I think, are the most important words there are for a storyteller. Anything you can do to keep people turning the pages is legitimate.

Most of us find our own voices only after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.

My advice to anybody starting out is just go find them, go talk to them. Talk to people.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

Kids will make their nightmares up out of anything, and the important thing in fiction, if you’re giving them nightmares, is to demonstrate that nightmares are beatable.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

I learned to write by writing.

Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

Every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

You’re always you, and that doesn’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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?

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

Make good art.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semicolons, for wasted effort.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

Life is a disease…invariably fatal.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes…you’re Doing Something.

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up,