The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn't ever really worked for me. I think it's had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.

All right. Tell me what I'm looking at." From the improvised Rolling Stones T-shirt bag tied to my sash, Bob the Skull said, in his most caustic voice, "A giant pair of cartoon lips." I muttered a curse and fumbled with the shirt until one of the skull's glowing orange eye sockets was visible. A big goofy magic nerd!" Bob said.

All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose-it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.

Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.

I put it down to the paranoia of advancing age. It isn't like I'm all that old or anything, especially for a wizard, but age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good.

Ease off the martyr throttle.

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.