“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

“But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers I have read, all the people I have met, all the women I have loved, and all the cities I have visited.”

“If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“If cats looked like frogs, we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”

“What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not foolin' a soul.”

“You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts, but you cannot deny he's got style.”

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.”

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

“Kaz leaned back. "What's the easiest way to steal a man's wallet?"”

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody, no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

“You get a little moody sometimes, but I think that's because you like to read. People who like to read are always a little fucked up.”

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“Laughter is timeless. Imagination has no age. Dreams are forever.”

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

“"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," I said, sighing. "Is it?" Veronica asked, surprised. "Universally acknowledged? Surely that presupposes societies beyond this planet, and besides..." "No, no, it's a quote from... Never mind," I said.”

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

“Well, I'm not kissing the mundane. I'd rather stay down here and rot.”

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

“I hope that in this year to come you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you're doing something.”

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.”

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“To define is to limit.”

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt.”

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

“Being crazy isn't enough.”

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”

“Books may well be the only true magic.”

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”