The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

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.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.