"The idea came to him, not for the first time, that most of the things which people buy in the belief that they are luxuries are really poor substitutes for luxury."

"'I didn't find it in the least difficult,' said Grigg. 'Those meant to succeed at a thing never do find the thing difficult.' 'Meant? Meant by whom?' 'By the life of which they are a part, whether they know it or not.' 'It is very mystical,' said Grigg."

""You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time". (Ch. 25)"

"Some days you go to your office and you're the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in."

"I don’t think I've ever made up anything, everything has happened. Nothing's made up. You don't have to make anything up in this world."

"In terms of a short story, I'd like a more horrific/bad ending. In terms of longer stories, fans usually get emotionally attached to characters when reading long form. If I know that's the case, I want to end it on a good note, so people don't end up hating it. For me personally, I prefer short stories and ending it in a horrifying way because I'm also good at it."

"A lot of modern movies take the approach of shocking the audience with things like jump scares. I grew up with the old-timey Hammer and Universal horror movies which focus more on creating a scary mood, so I prefer movies that gradually scare the audience with eerie atmosphere. Jump scares can certainly make people scared in the moment, but it's sort of a fleeting fear. I suppose it's all a matter of taste."

"I think pen-drawn art has its own charm. The brightness of the picture produced by the contrast between black lines and the white of the paper, and the atmosphere created from the drawn lines… I think they cannot be expressed by live-action so easily."

"I think in horror the eyes are really important. How you draw them can totally change how scary a story is. I think the scariest part of the body is probably people’s eyes."

"I think a lot about why people want to read horror or look at horror and what is the value of seeing something scary, why do we want to write something scary? I do think about that, and my thinking is that life is kind of uncertain. The future is uncertain; we don’t know what is going to happen. Maybe something bad is waiting for us, like, we don’t know, and there’s that uncertainty and that anxiety that comes from that. So if we see something scary, if we look at these scary things, then maybe we can prepare mentally for that. Maybe it’s some kind of readying our minds for possible future terrors."

"Comics utilize images, angles, and feelings that are hard to create in the real world. I think it’s hard to reproduce the overall atmosphere of a comic into a movie, because a film must use real actors and actresses that are not perfectly matched with my original work."

"You can half-expect things. Try to face them in advance, case-harden your mind, you think - but when they come, it's always different."

"Primitive man would see every one of us as a magician."

"The vitriol throwers and smilers with knives"

"If life weren't so short it would be worth people's while to do more to put the world to rights."

"One man's trash is another's souvenir."

"Life isn't very long. You see that plainly when you begin to look at it from the other end. Not time to do very much."

"Pretty girls are lovely as the flowers in May, but there are so many flowers in May."

"She agreed, really. But she said, well, this is the kind of world we have to live in. There is so very much that's wrong with it, but then life is so short that the best anyone can do is to come to terms with it while doing her best to preserve her own standards. She said it would be different if we had more time to spare, but now there isn't enough margin to make people do things about it. By the time your children have grown up you're beginning to get old, so it isn't worth trying to do much, and then in another twenty-five years it will be the same for them, and— Why, Diana, what on earth's the matter . . . ?"

"'The wise lamb does not enrage the lion,' he said. 'It placates him, plays for time, and hopes for the best.'"

"'If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does. . . .'"

"She doesn't think about anything—she's sort of programmed, like a computer. There's a conditioned response system. She hears, and then acceptance, rejection, and reaction drums go click-click-click, and the answer comes out sort of codified, just exactly right for people who use the same code." "Isn't that a little intolerant?" Francis had suggested. "After all, aren't we all rather like that if we consider ourselves honestly?" "To some degree," Zephanie admitted. "Only some people seem to be rigged always to play the house—like fruit machines."

"'The law punishes the criminal after he has been successful: it is no use to us.'"

"'The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.'"

"'In point of fact our ascendancy has been so complete that we are rarely called upon to kill wolves nowadays - in fact, most of us have quite forgotten what it means to have to fight in a personal way against another species. But, when the need arises we have no compunction in fully supporting those who slay the threat whether it is from wolves, insects, bacteria, or filterable viruses; we give no quarter, and certainly expect no pardon.'"

"There's a type of woman who isn't content until she's made herself some man's slave and doormat—put herself completely in his power."

""This isn't a nice cosy world for anyone—especially not for anyone that's different," he said."

"'Nobody,' she said, 'nobody but a child, or a child-minded person, expects life to be fair.'"

"'Cruelty is as old as life itself.'"

"'And, after all, what is a planet but an island in space?'"

"We shan't get homo superior without any birth-pangs."

"Look at us—thousands more of us every day. . . In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn't solution, and when the breakdown comes there'll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison. I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. 'That's their worry,' we say. 'Damn our children's children; we're all right.' ... [...] Like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages."

"WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT !"

"Unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic principles."

"My impression was of an uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime for me to show myself safely."

"Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?"

"Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence."

""We ourselves have a tradition of taking beatings, and then winning wars," said Bocker."

"'We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.'"

"'You can't drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting 'em there.'"

"Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent."

"In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for."

"She rummaged in a battered bag beside her, brought out a dirty spoon, and began to taste the beans as if they were one of the jams of paradise."

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

"'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'"

"How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]"

"Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there."

"Safe passage along the catwalk of one's own racial code must be achieved through long experience; it is harder still to climb from it to another, and when that other is as involved as a maze and is entirely supported by incomprehensible misconceptions, a foot is bound to slip through the fabric from time to time."