"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"Even a really bad creator would at least have started with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Surprise."
— Terry Pratchett

"'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,' he said. 'Have you thought of going into teaching?'"
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
— Stephen King

"I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all."
— Stephen King

"You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants."
— Stephen King

"Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics."
— Stephen King

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
— T.S. Eliot

""Nobody likes a clown at midnight""
— Stephen King

"Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly."
— Stephen King

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."
— Stephen King (Different Seasons)

"I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore'."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"
— Edgar Allan Poe

"A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true."
— Terry Pratchett

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."
— Terry Pratchett

"Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom."
— Terry Pratchett

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)

"The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person."
— Lynne Truss (Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)

"Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.""
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?"
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

"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 fooling a soul."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
— Neil Gaiman

"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."
— Neil Gaiman

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman