“The night is always old. He'd walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and g, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. Terrors unfolded in the velvet shadows and while the nature of the talons may change, the nature of the beast does not.”

“Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.”

“There is a night that never comes to an end....The clock of the world turns under its own shadow. Midnight is a moving place, hurtling around the planet at a thousand miles an hour like a dark knike, cutting slices of daily bread off the endless loaf of Time.”

“He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.”

“She prowled the city on moonlit nights, and OK, there was the occasional chicken, but she always remembered where she'd been and went round the next day to shove some money under the door. It was hard to be a vegetarian who had to pick bits of meat out of her teeth in the morning. She was definately on top of it, though. It was easy to be a vegetarian by day. It was preventing yourself from becoming a humanitarian at night that took the real effort.”

“I often thought that everyone has their, you know, natural age.”

“The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday.”