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.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that?

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.