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

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.

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.

Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.

Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.

If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad.

Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.