I crossed a thousand leagues to come to you, and lost the best part of me along the way. Don't tell me to leave.

I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.

Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.

From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.

Do the dead frighten you?

The air smelled of paper and dust and years.

We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth.