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

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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