He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

We all owe death a life.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

We are the storytelling animal.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Reality is a question of perspective.