Quotes from Marcus Sedgwick

That is the power of the book. Immortality, for better, or for worse. It is majestic, in its way, this immortality. And power. Once a story is started, once a lie is told, it is very difficult to un-tell it . . .

people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them...

If. The smallest word, which raises the biggest questions.

Secondly, I continued my education in a more important way, through the observation of everyone around me, because nothing is more important to learn in life than the interaction of a human being with another human being.

The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn't work like that. And neither should a good story. A good story ought to leave a little grey behind, I think.

Yes. You see, the whole nature, shape and even the modern blue pigment of the TARDIS is so deeply unfamiliar to the primitive mind that, although the optic nerve registers its presence, the brain cannot decode what it is seeing. The primitive visual cortex is unable to relay information about it consciously to the viewer. In effect, even though her chameleon circuit is still damaged, she's as good as invisible. She'll be just fine.

If what we make comes back to haunt us , to define us and alter us, well, then, hadn't we better be very careful what we create?

All he felt was that same feeling he'd always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn't even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night and with his father had gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name. Home.

Home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made of memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love!

Orwell's vision of our terrible future was that world - the world in which books are banned or burned. Yet it is not the most terrifying world I can think of. I think instead of Huxley [...] I think of his Brave New World. His vision was the more terrible, especially now because it appears to be rapidly coming true, whereas the world of 1984 did not. What is Huxley's horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read one.

You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life.

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

They said something funny. They said, 'Even God leaves on the last boat from Nome.' What does that mean?

The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, murder and assassination.

Yet every writer worth a good-god damn knows this too, for it is graven into each of us: no one cares for beauty. Not in fiction. Not on its own, not pure, untroubled beauty; not in fiction. [...] For here is the only real difference between the life of reality and the life of fiction. Fiction only works when the beauty is tainted by pain. For fiction is not about life; it's about the troubles of life.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

He'd watch the loading and unloading of boats; the building of houses, shacks, and huts; and above all, the people, each carrying a bundle of stories inside them.

Remember this: every man has to find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. I believe that. You just have to find out what it is you're looking for.

Monsters lurk in every culture's life blood – the history of the world is as much the history of its monsters as its angels, and who is the more fascinating: Elizabeth Bathory and her blood-bathing, or Mother Teresa and her poor? Vlad ?epe? and his impalings, or Saint Francis and his birds? I wish I could give you better answers, I really do, but monsters throng about us; they always have.

Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them.

Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it's about how much you care for someone else.

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

Who holds the ultimate responsibility for the story? The writer or the reader, the reader or the writer . . .