Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.

When someone writes something dazzlingly brilliant, people want to imitate it. The result is a lot of less-than-brilliant knock-offs. Elves, Dwarves, Goblin army, cursed ring, evil sorcerer. Tolkien did it. It rocked. Let's move on. Let's do something new.

The cost of a loaf is a simple thing, and so a loaf is often sought, but some things are past valuing: laughter, land, and love are never bought.

Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth.... A mother's love isn't cliché, it's universal. These things are archetypes. They're the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human.

I don't try to take a person out of our world and put them into my world; that wouldn't work. It's sort of like bad Photoshop: If you see something Photoshopped together - and even if it's done pretty well - the eye catches on it. That happens a lot when people try to cut and paste people from our world into their fourteenth-century historical romance novel.

My only real daydreamy casting over the years has been Natalie Portman for Denna. She's an amazing actress, and Denna is going to be one of the hardest characters to pull off.

Dawn was coming. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.