The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

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.

Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

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.