That's one form of magic, of course." "What, just knowing things?" "Knowing things that other people don't know.

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.

I mistrust the term graphic novel because it sounds like a good thing to put on a tee-shirt. That's why the French like them.

What do you call those things at the bottom of rivers? Frogs? Stones? Unsuccessful gangsters?