I write every day for most of the work day, and I try to write 2,500 words per day... If I don't make it a routine and treat it like a job, I'd never get anything done.

In teaching writing, I'm learning new things about writing.

Guy Gavriel Kays Tigana is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. Its beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.

Guy Kay is probably my favorite and the writer I most want to emulate.

Writing about craft has forced me to think more about my own writing technique, and to break down my process in ways that have been enormously helpful to me.

I listen to instrumental jazz and bluegrass, but aside from my AM workout, I have no rituals.

The closer you can get to your setting and to primary sources, the more authentic your history is going to be.

As I write, invariably I encounter more questions and answer those as I go.

I love magic and playing with magic systems. But to me, good fantasy like all fiction comes down to good character and plotting.

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.

The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.

I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.

At the end of my life I want to say, “I lived every moment of it.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

Don't leave a piece of jewelry at his house so you can go back and get it later; he may be with his real girlfriend.

Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone, I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.

He can't kick with his left foot, he can't head a ball, he can't tackle and he doesn't score many goals. Apart from that he's all right.

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

Real wealth comes to the person who learns that we are paid best for the things we do for nothing.

I found the secret to life: I'm ok when everything is not ok.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.