Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

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.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

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.