I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

There's no more secure investment in the next generation than your prayers for your children!

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

To overcome fear, act as if it were impossible to fail, and it shall be.

In a time of continued population growth the consequences are devastating, needless to say. The Earth is too crowded already in terms of aura, and it's growing at 20 percent a decade.

No time is wasted time

Italy even in the future will not need aid from the European Financial Stability Fund.

Pity is a corroding thing.

In a nation where the disbelievers sought Heaven from the idols, the Messenger of Allah [Prophet Muhammad] taught them that Heaven can be found through a simple smile.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.