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.

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

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

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 very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.

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?