Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

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.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.