Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"What makes you think I'm giving you a ride? Because I'm a damsel in distress, she said. And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car."

"What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?"

"What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.''"

"What do stars do? They shine."

"What need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?"

"What?s your name, lad? Newton. Newton Pulsifer. LUCIFER? What?s that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters? That?s Pulsifer, explained Newton. With a P. I don?t know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey. The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed."

"What, asked Mr Croup, do you want? What, asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, does anyone want? Dead things, suggested Mr Vandemar. Extra teeth."

"What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore obviously thinks so too. Strangers in Paradise is a delightful new comic, and Terry Moore is a fun writer and a fine cartoonist."

"What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything."

"What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything."

"When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel."

"When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?"

"Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write areal death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own."

"Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it."

"Whatever's happening, she said, eventually, it can all be sorted out. She saw the expression on my face then, worried. Scared even. And she said, After pancakes."

"Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished."

"What's it like then? asked Old Bailey. Being dead? The marquis sighed. And then he twisted his lips up into a smile, and with a glitter of his old self, he replied, Live long enough, Old Bailey, and you can find out for yourself."

"What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgottrn how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?"

"When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open."

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."

"When I was young I was a fool. So wrap me up in dreams and death."

"When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf."

"When most people said I'm psychic, you see, they meant I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/ talk to my budgie; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have."

"When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn't do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn't do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared."

"When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others."

"When people tell you there?s something wrong with a story, they?re almost always right. When they tell what it is that?s wrong and how it can be fixed, they?re almost always wrong."

"When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader."

"When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art."

"When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn?t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was? places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that?s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I started to realize that actually, you?re not losing books. You?re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, Well, what about the sales that I?m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there? I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I?d say, Okay, do you have a favorite author? They?d say, Yes. and I?d say, Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands. And then, Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands. And it?s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who?s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that?s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, You know, that?s really all this is. It?s people lending books. And you can?t look on that as a loss of sale. It?s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free. What you?re actually doing is advertising. You?re reaching more people, you?re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that?s an incredibly good thing."

"When you are scared, but you do it anyway, that's brave."

"When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It?s scientific. That?s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine."

"When writing a novel, that?s pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.'"

"When you don't know where you're going it always seems longer - you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it's over in a flash."

"When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn?t it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob?"

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. It's all right we whisper, I'm here, I love you. and we lie: I'll never leave you. For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."

"When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it."

"When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget."

"When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do."

"When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back."

"When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights, and lock the universe behind me as I leave."

"When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from."

"Whenever it rains, you will think of her."

"While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe."

"When you reach the little house, the place your journey started, you will recognize it, although it will seem much smaller than you remember. Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once. And then go home. Or make a home. And rest."

"Whither thou goest..."

"Where does contagion end and art begin?"

"When I was very young, somebody ? maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie ? told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it ... It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go."

"Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that."

"What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?' 'Cats don't have names,' it said. 'No?' said Coraline. 'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names."