“The bullets are gun-eggs, Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seek...”

“Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.”

“I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what th...”

“Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.”

“How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, s...”

“We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge”

“Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.”

“That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.”

“Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes y...”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”