Quotes from David Almond

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

There's nowt to know. A miserable caulker. But you, you're different, and you'll be grown and gone afore I know." He stared from the window. Sleet splashed down onto the pebbledash outside. "And this is hardly a place that'll draw you back," he said.

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.

I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then.

Well, well," she murmurs as I back away. She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it. "You're right," she says. "The boy's a living work of art.

stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea.

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.

Anyway, in the end, I don't really believe in Heaven at all and i don't believe in perfect angles. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven't quite realized it yet.

They think schools stop you from learning,' I said. 'They think schools try to make everybody just the same.

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop our walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

Death is hungry and Destruction is determined and it does not like its intended victims to get away.

You should be worried, says Hassan. I have seen worse monsters than you, Anderson. I have seen what nobody should see. I have felt what nobody should feel. I know what nobody should know. What would it be to me to see this knife in your throat? Nothing. What would it be for me to see you as dead as this deer? Nothing. What would it be to me to see you lying dead among the jetsam on the beach?

I won't ask for enything mor complicated today as I don't wish to further disapoynt myself.

You're my best boy. Whatever happens, you'll always be my best boy.

I closed my eyes and tried to discover where the happy half of me was hiding. I felt the tears trickling through my tightly closed eyelids. I felt Whisper's claws tugging at my jeans. I wanted to be all alone in an attic like Skellig with just the owls and the moonlight and an oblivious heart.

My mother educates me, she said. We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the word, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom.

He narrows his eyes. "Is this true?" He sighs. "It is, isn't it? That's all I need.

I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.

She points at my chest. "And much more interestingly, what's that?" "Blood," I say. She gets her camera out.

Words are too easy," he says. He opens his book. "What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. What on earth will you be doing with something so large? said Mum. I shall live in it with my servants, of course, said Mina. Or I shall establish a school. A school, my lady? Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

My name is Mina and I like the night. Everything is possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

There were hundreds of tiny creases and cracks all over his pale face. A few fine colourless hairs grew on his chin.

I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tail.