For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.

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.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

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

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

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