She knew the way of things. She knew ifyou weren’t always stepping lightly as a bird the wholeworld came apart to crush you. Like a house of cards.Like a bottle against stones. Like a wrist...

Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn’t talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.

Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.

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...

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.

Chronicler shook his head and Bast gave a frustrated sigh. “How about plays? Have you seen The Ghost and the Goosegirl or The Ha’penny King?”Chronicler frowned. “Is that the one where the king sells his...

I cannot help but wonder how many of us walk through our lives, day after day, feeling slightly broken and alone, surrounded all the time by others who feel exactly the same way.

There is something deeply satisfying in shaping something with your hands. Proper artificing is like a song made solid. It is an act of creation.

are sweet music in a distant room.

It’s a shame you left without a word, you know. She was just beginning to trust you before that. Before you got angry. Before you ran off. Just like every other man in her life....

Think of all the stories you’ve heard, Bast. You have a young boy, the hero. His parents are killed he sets out for vengeance. What next?”Bast hesitated, his expression puzzled. Chronicler answered the question instead....

When someone tells you a piece of their life, they’re giving you a gift, not granting you your due.

Why wasn’t I already kissing this woman? Why wasn’t I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing...

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you’re at it?...

The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just books about orcs and goblins and dragons and wizards and bullshit. And to be fair, a...

The best lies about me are the ones I told.

I understand that if I saw a horse with a leg this badly ‘sprung,’ I’d kill it out of mercy, then burn its poor corpse for fear the local dogs might gnaw on it and...

A Tinker’s Debt is Always Paid:Once for a simple trade.Twice for freely given aid.Thrice for any insult made.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn’t have needed to write a whole novel about it.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating … but there are other ways to understanding.

Dawn was coming. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

She washed he hands,then looked at my side. “you haven’t even had it stitched?” She said incredulously.”I’ve been rather busy,” I said. “With the running like hell and hiding all night.

I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn’t but a lot of thought into what it might...

If you fall, you fall,” Elodin shrugged. “Sometimes falling teaches us things too.” In dreams you often fall before you wake.