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

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

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.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.