The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the Law is an ability to change it.

Don't go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.

I try not to think too much about an audience when Im writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what Ive written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.