I'm not a role model. I'm an aberation. A statistical anomoly. Following in my footsteps is about the dumbest thing you could ever do.

Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woefully small targets.

My bad luck got tangled up with my bad decisions, and I'm paying for it.

I've read fantasy my whole life. Quite literally; my mom read me The Hobbit before I could read stuff to myself. So I love fantasy; that's what I read for fun, it's what I read professionally to keep abreast of what's in the genre - it's where my heart is.

Humor is hard, hard, hard. And if you fail with humor, you don't fail halfway. You drop the ball humor-wise and everyone notices.

I want to learn how to pick locks, swordfight, throw pottery - it's all research. It's like the curious person's version of James Bond's license to kill. I've got a license to learn.

I'm not a stereotypical professor type. I don't smoke a pipe and wear a tweedy jacket. I'm more like a student who stayed at the university for so long that they gave him a job to keep him out of trouble.