I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

The real world is horrible.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

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 recognize that on paper, you can't really tell that I'm a fan or a nerd.

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.