Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.

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

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.