“Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.”

“I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?”

“For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.”

“Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?”

“What's happened to the world? she was thinking. Everything has turned terrible...and the bits that aren't terrible have gone mad. I don't understand anything anymore.”

“It’s so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.”