“All bookshelves are magical.”

“M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...”

“If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”

“Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.”

“Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment.”

“Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.”

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”