“Sexton: I think the whole world's gone mad.Death: Uh-uh. It's always like this. You probably just don't get out enough.”

“Oh - that family, yes. There are still some photos of them around here. They look like nice people, don't they?"They...'look like nice people'?"Well, they do, don't they? Of course, they never actually existed - except maybe in the most tenuous and retrospective way - but still, it's nice to think they were good people."Uh. Right. Gee, I suppose you must do a lot of drugs.”

“You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay.Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like that.”

“It's patterns," he said. "If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama anymore. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”

“I guess it's just another one of life's little mysteries.""I'm tired of mysteries.""Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.”

“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 can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”

“It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.”