“Mendanbar took a deep breath. You could stay here. At the castle, I mean. With me. This wasnt coming out at all the way he had wanted it to, but it was too late to stop now. He hurried on, As Queen...”

“Sometimes, though, you have to do things for family, even if you'd rather not.”

“You can't force folks to have good sense, even if they're family. Maybe especially then.”

“Then they gave me a loaf of bread and told me to walk through the forest and give some to anyone who asked. I did exactly what they told me, and the second beggar-woman was a fairy in disguise, but...”

“I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing moreplus, I knew ...”

“Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”