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

“He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”

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

“I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

“You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.”

“An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.”

“I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.”

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”

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

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”

“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

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

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”

“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 don'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?”

“In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”

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

“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 forgot.”

“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.”