Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.
What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.
Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.
Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.
I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.
Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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.
It's an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek
I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.
The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.
How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.
He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.
I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.
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.
Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'
Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.
Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!
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.
I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.
Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.
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.
About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there.
I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.
Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
Most people are blind to magic. They move thru a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.
His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.
It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.
You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.