Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

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

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.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.