[...] the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.

It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.

Words are the litmus paper of the mind.

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.