Hope is a force of nature. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!

I mean it," I said. "You're in danger." "Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Something like this will test you like nothing else," Mac said. "You're going to find out who you are, Harry. You're going to find out which principles you'll stand by to your death--and which lines you'll cross." He took my empty glass away and said, "You're heading into the badlands. It'll be easy to get lost.

My hair had grown out long and shaggy—not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way.

When a young writer comes up to me with an ambitious idea for a 20-book series, I usually tell him to maybe try something smaller to start off with.