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" I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed. "

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" Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed. "

" I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream. "

" So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them. "

" As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream. "

" Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to. "

" 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. "

" Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus? "

" I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect. "

" It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. "

" I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer. "

" I'm a fairly undisciplined writer. "

" I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much. "

" The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked... that's the moment you may be starting to get it right. "

" My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him. "

" With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children. "

" I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. "

" Also, I've already won all the awards. "

" For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted. "

" I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction. "

Science Fiction

" 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. "

" Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did. "

" I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out. "

" Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour. "

" 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. "

" I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something. "

" I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' "

" And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it. "

" Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation. "

" Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. "

" Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. "