“You’ve always got me”“Always?”“Didn’t I just say so?”“Yes”“Am I liar? ““No.” I lied.”

“I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...”

“As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.”

“We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.”

“So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”

“I'm an inclusionist. I've always divided up (very, very broadly, I admit) the artistic instincts into the inclusionist and the exclusionist. The exclusionist is Raccine. The inclusionist is Shakespeare. I've always felt like I'd prefer to throw 45 things into the pot and hope that maybe 36 of them will taste good. You may choke on 9 of them. I'd rather do that than only have half that number of elements and each one perfect. That's because I know that people choke on different things.... I think that when I was a kid, the experience of things, the experience of just finding words for things, of finding somebody else's world and being able to leap into it and, like any world, you pick up the geography instantly. You expected the thing to unfold, you expected there to be valleys that upon entering that world you were barely aware of. For me a novel, particularly a large novel, one you put down at the end and think, 'Hell, that was interesting. I'm not sure I understood Chapters X, Y and Z, but maybe next time I read it or talk to someone about it, I will'... that's a very different experience to the immaculately formed, beautifully honed, finished 'art' thing.”

“Believe me, when I say;There are no two powersThat command the soul.One is GodThe other is the tide.-AnonFrom the novel Abarat”