"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
— Oscar Wilde

"When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it’s crippling-like having your heart carved out.
(Acheron to Kat)"
— Sherrilyn Kenyon

"If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my sould to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to."
— Martin Luther

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."
— Martin Luther

"The Devil's out of fashion."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
— Graham Greene

"Sing like an angel, but dance like a devil."
— Moulin Rouge

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil"
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance."
— Charles Baudelaire

"All the cunning of the devil is exercised in trying to tear us away from the word."
— Martin Luther

"Yahweh: You've been unhappy because you've desired things that cannot be.

Lucifer: That's what desire IS. The need for what we can't have. The need for what's readily available is called greed."
— Mike Carey (Lucifer, Book 11: Evensong)

"I wake up and I see the face of the devil and I ask him, "What time is it?"

And he says,
"How much time do you want?""
— Diamanda Galás (The Shit of God: The Texts of Diamanda Galás)

"God sends meat and the devil sends cooks."
— Thomas Deloney

"Elaine: He saved my life twice. He's the only grown-up I know who keeps his promises.

Michael: Yes. It is a point of pride with him. But please –- don't mistake it for a virtue."
— Mike Carey (Lucifer, Book 02: Children and Monsters)

"For as from the same piece of clay a potter may fashion either a pot or a tile, so the Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all. For this occurs just as clay is first molded into one, then shaped into another form, for the Devil is a potter and his witches are but clay."
— Aino Kallas

"The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner."
— Karl Kraus

"I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold."
— Erik Larson

"...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"A woman being never at a loss... the devil always sticks by them."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Down there the nights are bright and nobody beleives in the Devil"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country."
— James Robertson (The Testament of Gideon Mack)

"The Devil himself had probably re-designed Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts."
— Anthony Price

"He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height"
— Gustave Flaubert

"" 'Not entirely fair' " His voice became that of the inferno: a rushing, booming howl of icy evil that flew around the great cavern, as swift and cold as the Wendigo on skates. "I am Satan, also called Lucifer the Light Bearer..."
Cabal winced. What was it about devils that they always had to give you their whole family history?
"I was cast down from the presence of God himself into this dark, sulfurous pit and condemned to spent eternity here-"
"Have you tried saying sorry?" interrupted Cabal.
"No, I haven't! I was sent down for a sin of pride. It rather Undermines my position if I say 'sorry'!""
— Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal the Necromancer)

" Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, it's contents had survived the transit. "Drink this," he said, unmoved by Cabal's anger. "You need to save your voice for your next session."
Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. there was a moments pause, just long enough for Cabal's expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes "Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?"
Horst's surprise was replaced with mild amusement. "It's root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?"
Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle "People drink this?"
"Yes"
"For non-medical reasons?"
"That's right."
Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. "They must be insane.""
— Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal the Necromancer)

"Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin."
— Joris-Karl Huysmans

"For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her."
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (Les Diaboliques)

"The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know."
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (Le bonheur dans le crime)

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."
— Norman Mailer

"Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture"
— Isak Dinesen

"...Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep..."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"If you have any care for Sin at all,
don't leave him in darkness. It's not fair to show someone the sun and then to banish him from it. Even the
devil may cry when he looks around hell and realizes that he's there alone - Acheron (Devil May Cry)"
— Sherrilyn Kenyon

"There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings"
— Alfred De Musset (Lorenzaccio)

"The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked."
— Thomas Moore