There were a lot of things he could say. 'Son of a bitch!' would have been a good one. Or he could say, 'Welcome to civilization!' He could have said, 'Laugh this one off!' He might have said, 'Fetch!' But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

God does not play games with His loyal servants', said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice.'Whoopee', said Crowley.

For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That's why it always went wrong.

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.

Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up.