I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.

Whenever I'm giving talks, I always ask people to think of the most obscure questions because I enjoy those the most. I always get the same questions: Why does Pickwick say "plock" and will there be a movie? I like the really obscure questions because there's so much in the books. There are tons and tons of references and I like when people get the little ones and ask me about them. It's good for the audience [and also] they realize there's more there.

Who do readers expect to see when they pick up this book? Who has won the Most Troubled Romantic Lead at the BookWorld Awards seventy-seven times in a row? Me. All me.

Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.

...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.