Why are you smiling?' 'I'm relieved,' I said honestly. 'I was worried I'd given myself cadmium poisoning, or I had some mysterious disease. This is just someone trying to kill me.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

So Stapes conducted a dinner for just the two of us, then informed me of a dozen small but important mistakes I had made. Setting down a dirty utensil was considered crude, for example. That meant it was perfectly acceptable to lick one's knife clean. In fact, if you didn't want to dirty your napkin it was the only seemly thing to do.

Whenever you write a character, you want to make them themselves, you want to make them unique. You don't want fifty characters in your book and they all pretty much act and think the same except they have different colored hair.

But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?

The best lies about me are the ones I told.

She looked at me. "What? Is there something wrong with my idea?" "It's not very heroic," I said dismissively. "I was expecting something with a little more flair." "Well, I left my armor and warhorse at home," she said. "You're just upset because your big University brain couldn't think of a way, and my plan is brilliant.