Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

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