Top 25 Quotes & Sayings by Tim Lebbon

Do you have to feel something for it to be real or mean anything? Can you touch your dreams, taste your imagination.

Fate knows all about you, it knows your fears and your weaknesses and your confidences and strengths, and it can be ready for all of them when it decides that the time is right. It can move you like a pawn in a terrible game of chess, sacrifice you for the good of others, drop you from a building you should never have been inside, give you a disease that no one has ever heard of. Luck and chance are impartial. Fate is active. It picks on people. Almost as if it thinks about things too much.

Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.

Get an agent. Seriously, submitting stuff unagented means it will end up on the slush pile. An agent is the first quality filter, and a good agent is worth his or her weight in gold, as they'll often know the editors on a personal level and will be able to talk to them directly about the project.

Hate misleads, fear distorts and love blinds.

To the discovered, the discoverer can be a god.

Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.

Love is harsh, and it consumes. And more than anything, it demands sacrifice.

Dreams are life, real life, not simply reflections. Dreams are honest.

Nature is a big influence on my work. That's where the cosmic element comes in, an awareness of the relevance of what we do as a species, why we do it, and its implications.

Voyaging great distances -- through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains -- is all about finding ourselves.

Growing up closes so many doors. The modern world doesn't allow for miracles, so we don't see them. It's a very precious gift, an open mind, but it's not passive. You've got to nurture it like a bed of roses; otherwise it will wither and die. Make sure you don't close off your mind to things you find strange. Sometimes they may be the only truth.

I like to think I'm positive and optimistic about things generally, but what I write does tend towards the darker end of the spectrum.

Real fear is like intense pain. It's there to warn you something's truly wrong.

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.

I tend to believe that computers are drawing kids -- and adults -- away from reading purely because they provide an alternative, vast source of spare-time amusement and entertainment. I recently heard a frightening statistic: there are less than one million true readers in this country (those who read every day instead of one book per year on a beach). Terrifying.

The reaction to death is sometimes as violent as death itself. Shock throws a cautious coolness over your senses, but your stomach still has knots, your skin stings as if the Reaper is glaring at you as well.

Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer.

At the heart of any poor soul not at one with the Force, there is only void.

Your life is a blank, and you're barely a shade across it.

The Force is neither light nor dark, master nor slave, but a balance between extremes.

There's no denying that the way horror has been packaged in the past has done it no favours. Lurid black covers adorned with skulls, corpses crawling with insects and scantily clad maidens being chewed into by vampires -- all good clean fun, but it doesn't do much to give the genre an air of respectability or seriousness to the casual browser.

If you do not fear God, then fear your dreams, because they're how He talks to you.

It wasn't a case of me sitting down and thinking, right then, what shall I do with my life? Airline pilot? Plumber? Guitar manufacturer? Writer .... yeah, writer. I've always loved writing, from a very early age--I guess I was writing my first stories when I was still in single digits. It progressed, and the love of writing grew in my mind and is still growing. Doing it full-time, there are different stresses and tensions, and the business side of it comes to the fore sometimes. But I still love it, and I'm always thankful that I can do what I do and make a living from it.

The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.