Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

It's an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.