One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper.

She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.

He grunted; she recognized it as relief that she wasn't going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn't that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills.

...there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.