It’s funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the night at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I’d Become or What Terrible Thing...

[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.

We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.

What this world doesn’t have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating,...

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them ‘magic’ or ‘dragons’ or ‘faeries’ and get to know...

It was Ebon’s turn now, and he stepped forward and gave the pegasus’ great clarion neigh — far more like a trumpet than a horse’s neigh; hollow bones are wonderful for resonance — and swept...

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with...

When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’. I’m not...

And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They’re the first and worst monster that lives under everybody’s bed.

She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a...

Sylvi wished she could gouge out the look in Dorogin’s stony eyes, and change the course of history. She wished Fthoom had been eaten by a sea monster.

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like sticky plaster-dust. (House-cleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If...

I’m also old… and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I’m not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say...

There are stories about “good” vampires like there are stories about the loathly lady who, after a hearty meal of raw horse and hunting hound and maybe the odd huntsman or archer, followed by an...

It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you don’t have a life.

Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.

I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.

[the sheep] sidled up beside him and bumped him lovingly with its head. Val looked at it sadly. “I am sorry, you ugly creature,” he said. “I have not used my magic in a long...

As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.

Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.

It wasn’t so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren’t, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only...

It’s kind of interesting you’re driving a car big enough for a wolfhound and a mastiff to get in the back of today,” I said.”And a greyhound, a dark brown bear, and a brindle utility...

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you’re fussing that he’s tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.But I...

When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.

…but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago...

Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.

The sheep, I guess demented with love, didn’t object to this at all. Casimir somehow found time to pull up some grass for it, and it lay down and munched its grass and then chewed...

The big difference between my mom and me– besides the fact that she is dead normal and I’m a magic-handling freak– is that she’s the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other...

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

…there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.

I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and...

I’d always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

Even Mongo liked him, although Mongo likes everybody. (Also Mongo was so thrilled with himsel for staying in the dog bed till I’d released him that nothing was going to blow his mood.)

What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you...

I wondered what you’d have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you’re scared enough. I was scared enough.

The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to...

Her betrothed is a lout, her father is a boor; and now her brother is trailing around looking like a thunderstorm about to burst. Men are not sensible creatures.”Thank you,’ said Robin.

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

But I’m going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I’m leav­ing out, because there’s still stuff I’m just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

It doesn’t matter if I’m only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months’ supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it...

She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular knight and hoped that, when he...

Majid gave me a brief dazzling golden stare and then half-lidded his eyes again. I know when my life is being threatened.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?

The Pavilion did not burn by lightening,” she said.He hesitated again. “It holds the memory of fire,” he said at last. “Lightening is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit...

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?’It doesn’t, really … Somewhere where it all balances out – don’t the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? – if...

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.