That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

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.

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

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