When a young writer comes up to me with an ambitious idea for a 20-book series, I usually tell him to maybe try something smaller to start off with.

The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family.

Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.

I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.

HARRY DRESDEN—WIZARD Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment

I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable.

I'd made the vampire cry. Great. I felt like a real superhero. Harry Dresden, breaker of monsters' hearts.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.

There is the world that should be and the world that is. We live in one and must create the other.

Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

You have to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.

I wanted to be a Disney Channel star! I wanted to be Hannah Montana.

They had so much rain in New York that a lot of the cabbies had their first shower in years.

I really like to put my name on everything, so my roommate doesn't steal it. It's really a throwback to that.

There are some very significant changes in the way the fluids are distributed in our body, the way our heart functions initially, and as well as our bone and muscle.

I don't think that politics are as complex as people like to make them seem or out to be.

Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.

God is a refiner, not an arsonist.

We just fight our way through it. But you can't just get up and walk out without repeating the behavior over and over.