It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
There is really no end to life’s little humiliations.
I’m a fantasy writer. I don’t do SF. This is important to me. If you’re not clear on what genre you’re in, everything gets muddled, and it’s hard to know which rules you’re breaking.
The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.
Most people are blind to magic. They move thru a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.
Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
We’re wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn’t, we start looking around for the real world.
People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
Maybe there’s a sense that technology isn’t necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world – a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
It’s an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek.
There’s a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that’s something people are looking for.
The real world is horrible.
It’s natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed – it was – impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.