There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.