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.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

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.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

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.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it.

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes, ” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?

They may not know each other to say it, but it was never hidden. How much ever they hated each other, fate ties them together.

We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.

You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!

The problem is I am both a procrastinator and a power junkie, so I am very frustrating to work with.

Coffee has always been a significant part of my life. For me, it's a chance to start my day and gather my thoughts - it's fuel for my creative process.

Hate smolders and eventually destroys, not the hated but the hater.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Success--something your friends will never forgive you.

Tension is anticipation and uncertainty. Every art has to have it.