Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places.

Imagination is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination.

Shall I add a man to my collection?

At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven't heard the end of it yet.

Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

[Imagination] must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier.