"Simon,” said a voice at his shoulder, and he turned to see Izzy, her face a pale smudge between dark hair and dark cloak, looking at him, her expression half-angry, half-sad. “I guess this is the part where we say good-bye?

My ideas often come from strong mental images. When I'm observing some relatively ordinary thing, I'll think, "What if...." and out of that brainstorming a story emerges.

So John took out of his pocket A knife both long and sharp, And stuck it through his brother's heart, And the blood came pouring down. Says John to William, "Take off thy shirt, And tear it from gore to gore, And wrap it round your bleeding heart, And the blood will pour no more.

Magnus, you were trying to flirt with your own plate." "I'm a very open-minded sort of fellow!

A lot of people feel like urban fantasy is a shortcut that gets you around world-building, because it's set "in the real world." But it doesn't really work that way, as I found out. You have to come up with just as consistent an internal cosmology and magic system as you would if you were writing high fantasy.

The past is nothing to [the young], not even another country as it is to the old, or even a nightmare as it is to the guilty.

She warned me about Mr. Herondale, though, said he’d likely be rude to me, and familiar. She said I could be rude right back, that nobody would mind.” “Someone ought to be rude to him. He’s rude enough to everyone else.