“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”

“Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.”

“Approaching the forest from the west was no army, but a delegation of Grailsundanian master surgeons on their way to an appendix conference . . . But that isn't the craziest part of the story - oh, no, my boy, for approaching from the east was a party of itinerant watchmakers bound for the pocket-watch fair at Wimbleton . . . But not even that is the craziest part of the story! For apporaching from the south were over a hundred armourers and locksmiths on their way to Florinth, where some power-hungry prince had commissioned them to build a monstrous war machine . . . Well, that would be enough crazy coincedences for an averagely crazy story but the battle of Nurn Forest involved the most improbable coincedences in the history of Zamonia. For entering the forest, this time from the north came a delegation of alchemists.”

“There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades.”

“If he survived Roaming Rock, he kept telling himself, death would have lost its sting.”

“A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen-and-a-half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious.”

“I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer’s block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gripped by fear of the blank sheet in front of me. It is infallible, and its effect is always the same: the knot unravels and a stream of words gushes out on to the virgin paper. It acts like a magic spell and I sometimes fancy it really is one. But, even if it isn’t the work of a sorcerer, it is certainly the most brilliant sentence any writer has ever devised. It runs: ‘This is where my story begins.’”