“Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”
“You don't want the world destroyed, because, you know, that's where your shoes are.”
“After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.”
“The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.”
“I'm a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.”
“One thing I've learned now is that I should not say when a book is coming out until I'm sure I know.”
“It's profoundly disorienting to go from zero to celebrity.”
“One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.”
“As authors, most - most authors , our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.”
“I've done a lot of interviews of the last few years, and I've actually started a list of questions that it would be fun to ask an author, but no respectable interviewer would ever ask. Since I'm not respectable, I'm going to start doing interviews with some authors I know, just for fun.”