It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

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.

As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.

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

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.

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?