The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

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

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.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.