. . . For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven. And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again.

He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

...it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.

I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?

He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.