I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing ‘The Magicians.’ I only ever considered it a standalone.
It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.
My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.
He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.
Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
Read everything. If you haven’t read everything, you’ll never be able to write anything.
I don’t know if I’ve ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from ‘Right Ho, Jeeves.’ It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.
I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.
He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore.
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.
Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.
Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn’t they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?
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.
His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else.
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.