Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

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

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.