...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?

My Google-fu is strong.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.

My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.