Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.
It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.
It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.
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.
Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.
I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.
There's a tale in the Caballa that suggests that the Angel of Death is so beautiful that upon seeing it (or him, or her) you fall in love so hard, so fast, that your soul is pulled out through your eyes. I like that story.
I don't believe in writer's block. I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.
So be wise. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise and then just behave like they would. Now go, and make interesting mistakes. Make Interesting. Mistakes. Make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for you being here. Make good art.
I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.
When most people said I'm psychic, you see, they meant I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination wear black nail varnish talk to my budgie; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.
In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.
I'm intrigued with figuring out the places where the horrible and the beautiful meet -- that aesthetic fascinates me.
Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.
I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispencing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don't like.
Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face.
We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last.
I sat in the dark and thought: There's no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.
The real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.
Books are defensive, not offensive (unless you're the puzzled adult trying to make the kid with the book interact).
It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.
Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything,' Ray said once, in an interview.
He gave people so many reasons to love him. We did. And, so far, we have not forgotten.
I spent much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.
Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
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.
Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.
It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad; I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.
Firstly, there no such person as Death.
Second, Death's this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with Scandinavians.
Third, he doesn't exist either.
Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.
We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.
Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind, Now slip, now slide, now move unseen, Above, beneath, betwixt, between.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.
A philosopher once asked, Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human? Pointless, really...Do the stars gaze back? Now that's a question.
I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.
One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.
In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, I hope you know what you are doing.
Of course I do, said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.
The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.
We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.
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.
The Doctor: Sorry, do you have a name?
Idris: Seven hundred years and finally he asks.
The Doctor: But what do I call you?
Idris: I think you call me... Sexy?
The Doctor: embarrassed Only when we're alone.
Idris: We are alone.
The Doctor: Oh. Come on then, Sexy.
If you read enough Lionel Fanthorpe, your brain starts to turn to jelly and just dribbles out of your ears.
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life's vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
There may be a parallel between woodcuts and radio; radio plays are a living art form everywhere except the USA.
I think radio plays are my favourite medium, as they make the listener work and create and contribute in a way that TV and film can never do, and they have an immediacy that written prose often lacks.
Some things are too big to be seen; some emotions are too huge to be felt.
Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.
Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.
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.
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist--books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.
That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.
I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.
If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.
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.
Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together.
I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.