Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

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

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

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.

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.