“The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them.”

“People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”

“[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...”

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

“This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “MaybeAnansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa inthe dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg,pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy storyabout a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respondto the stories. They tell them themselves. The storiesspread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.Because now the folk who never had any thought in their headbut how to run from lions and keep far enough away from riversthat the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting todream about a whole new place to live. The world may be thesame, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have thesame story, the one where they get born and they do stuff andthey die, but now the story means something different to what itmeant before.”

“Chantal is having a relationship with a sentence. Just one of those things. A chance meeting that grew into something important for the both of them.”