Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.