"Right at this moment, I don't care if they kill me. I don't care. But they're not going to kill my stories. They're not going to kill my stories. They're all I've got."
Katurian says this near the end of the play when he realizes that not only are they going to kill him but they are going to burn his stories as well. This line shows the devotion Katurian feels towards his stories, and towards fiction itself.
"Just the truth."
Katurian asks his brother what he told the cops, and this is Michal's response. With this line, Katurian realizes that his mentally disabled brother is actually implicated in the murder of the local children.
"...when I'm an old man, you know what? Little kids are gonna follow me around and they're gonna know my name and what I stood for, and they're gonna give me some of their sweets in thanks..."
Ariel says this as part of a long monologue to Katurian. Ariel is telling Katurian that they are on different sides of society, that he is on the side of children everywhere and his greatest desire is to be remembered for his good work protecting children from predators.
"Oh, I almost forgot to mention...I'm the good cop, he's the bad cop."
Tupolski says this to Katurian early in the play, to indicate to him that he is a more fair and forgiving cop than Ariel, who is more brutish and hot-headed. It is a humorous meta-theatrical moment, in which Tupolski appears more self-aware than expected.
"I'm not trying to say anything at all! That's my whole thing."
Katurian says this to Ariel and Tupolski early in the play to indicate that he has no moral or rhetorical aims in writing his stories. He does not intend for his stories of murder and violence to inspire the enactment of such violence. Rather, he suggests, he has no intention to "say" anything at all, or have a clear point of view.
"I like the Pillowman. He's my favorite."
Michal says this to Katurian in their holding cell together. "The Pillowman" is his favorite of his brother's stories, and must have some special significance, as it is the title of McDonagh's play.
"Detectives?! I would like to make a confession to my part in the murders of six people. I have one condition. It involves my stories."
Katurian yells this to Tupolski and Ariel after he has killed Michal. In this moment he decides that he will take the fall for killing his parents, his brother, and the three children that Michal killed.
"My story is better than all your stories."
After telling Katurian a story about a little deaf boy who is saved from getting hit by a train, Tupolski insists that his story is better than all of Katurian's.
"Can you fill us in on why the mute girl's still alive?"
At the end of the play, Ariel catches Katurian in his lie that he murdered the children, when he finds the third girl alive. The fact that the girl is alive after Katurian thought she was dead reveals that he was just taking the fall for Michal.
"Because, for reasons known only to himself, the bulldog of a policeman chose not to put the stories in the burning trash, but placed them carefully with Katurian's case file, which he then sealed away to remained unopened for fifty-odd years."
At the very end of the play, after getting shot in the head, Katurian narrates the fact that Ariel decides not to burn Katurian's stories as ordered, but to file them away to preserve his legacy as a storyteller and writer.
