"I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?"

"We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall."

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do."

"All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end."

"Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."

"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."

"The little folk dare anything", said his friend. "And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too."

"“‘He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong.’ “‘It was His will.’ “Lucifer stood. ‘Then perhaps His will is unjust. Perhaps the voices in the Darkness speak truly, after all. How can this be right?’ “‘It is right. It is His will. I merely performed my function.’ “He wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. ‘No,’ he said flatly.”"

"And our latest project was Death. It's one of the hard ones—one of the big ones, too, I suspect. Possibly it may even become the attribute that's going to define the Creation for the Created: If not for Death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning—a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross..."

"Even the better protected files corrupt, and the best protected corrupt absolutely."

"It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History."

"This is the kind of thing you wonder about when you make up things for a living."

"He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."

"“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”"

"A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch."

"[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was."

"People who sound insincere all the time […] should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere."

"As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution."

"He's taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs."

"[I]t's human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you've left behind."

"The real trouble with liars […] was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth."

"We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it."

"From an outsider's point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic."

"I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone […], only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.[…] Two's company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one's a crowd."

"Should you revisit us Stay a little longer And get to know the place... On local life we trust The resident witness Not the royal tourist."

"I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of the failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people."

"You can't screw the rich, something in Ronnie muttered as Miss Quick got off him with quite as much alacrity as she had got on him. You have to let them screw you. Or else you leave out screwing altogether."

"He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich — i.e. being rich — and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about."

"It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children."

"'You're still the same girl. What people do doesn't change their nature.' She shook her head.[…] 'What they do is their nature,' she said."

"Friendship includes charity. But there's no charity in sex."

"A great British prime minister once remarked that the people were divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, and in effect that these had no knowledge of each other. One might say the same, perhaps, of those who live in parts of the world where segregation by races is practised. But these barriers, or the reasons for them, belong to a part of our history which is fortunately passing away. There is one barrier, however, which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish. I'm talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive."

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; Girls aren't like that."

"[T]here was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."

"Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it."

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

"It isn't class differences that keep people apart, it's thinking they bloody matter."

"Jimmie had said more than once that the upper class enjoyed the true freedom of not caring what anybody else thought about them. Like children perhaps. If that had a bearing, there might be a connection with the boyishness of such people noted by some outside observers, including Indians under the British Raj and later."

"[W]e're all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody's forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life's not like that but what can we do?"

"'Do you think that's altogether fair to him, to Jimmie, that is? I realize you've known him longer than I have.' 'Maybe, maybe not. You know, darling, I think you're sometimes a bit carried away by fairness.'"

"That stuff you read didn't condition you, you chose it because it was what you wanted to hear."

"[W]hat's the point of growing a beard if you're not going to be a little bit free and easy?"

"It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes gruelling task of promiscuity."

"As soon as originality became important, the days of artistic merit or excellence were numbered."

"[B]eing a writer is much more important to the person, to the writer, than being anything else is to the person being it.[…] More than being a painter is to the painter or being a composer of music is to the composer, more than being anything else except maybe being a priest."

"You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish […]. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes."

"Nobody, however learned, however wise, can stand in the way of regress."

"Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats."

"'Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.'"