The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

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.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

Making a great first impression is not an accident, and with a little planning, experimentation, and application, you can transform your style, substance, and impact.

It's easy to believe in something when you win all the time...The losses are what define a man's faith.

Every time I make a film, I try to do it slightly different. If you're not 100% engaged and interested, then it's not gonna translate into a successful film.

I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips

I've always wanted to be an actor. I didn't get into this game to be the best improviser in the world. I didn't choose improv as a stepping stone, it just happened to become one.

The ground submits to the sky and suffers whatever comes. Tell me, is the Earth worse for giving in like that?

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

It is observed in the course of worldly things, that men's fortunes are oftener made by their tongues than by their virtues; and more men's fortunes overthrown thereby than by vices.