Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything...and not doing it only because you can.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

All [people] are intolerant.... Only they're intolerant of different things.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.