Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I rather think he knew anyway.
Oh, the boots were on the other eight feet now.
What is a gathering without unseemly drunkenness?
Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price.
Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.
Pardon me, Highness, a women waits whithout." "Whithout what?
Watch where you leave your victims! I stubbed my toe on that.
Her clarity gave her purpose and her purpose gave her clarity.
That's usually how they start, the young ones. Meaningless waffle.
That's usuаllу hоw thеу start, thе young оnеs. Meaningless waffle.
Ah, you coward! Look at you, running." "Actually, it's called improvising.
Besides, if you're going to die horribly, you might as well do it with style.
And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.
One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.
So I departed, leaving behind a pungent smell of brimstone. Just something to remember me by.
What was it that drew you back? My marvellous personality, I suppose? Or my sparkling conversation?
Burned and squashed to death in a silver vat of soup. There must be worst ways to go. But not many.
Hey, we've all got problems, chum. I'm overly talkative. You look like a field of buttercups in a suit.
Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Most traditional ghost stories feature rather hapless protagonists, who have nasty things happen to them.
The mercenary finished his coffee in a single gulp, It must have been piping hot, too. Boy, he was tough.
He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.
I got fairly good grades, but I was bad at woodwork. They said I tried hard, but the result was hopeless.
Long ago I dreamed of being a hero in your company" Halli said Huskily "I'm sorry to say your reality disappoints me
That's a gesture of endearment in some cultures. Some hug, some kiss, some set each other on fire in small patches of woodland
Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool. Weird...but somehow I like his style." "That is a footstool.
Haven't you done enough for a lifetime? Think about it - two power - crazed magicians killed, a hundred power - crazed magicians saved.
There was a loud cough from the man on the stand. I replaced My Magic Mirror carefully on his tray, gave him a cheesy smile, and went my way.
The Amulet of Samarkand. It was Simon Lovelace's. Now it is yours. Soon it will be Simon Lovelace's again. Take it and enjoy the consequences.
When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.
Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.
I like to have my characters talking in an up-to-date way, and I like their essentially modern self-awareness, which means we can have lots of irony and jokes.
Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.
My wife gave me a year to start making money out of writing, and after six months, I'd made not a bean. Suddenly, the books took off, and the beans started coming in!
I wanted to wake you straightaway, but I knew I had to wait several hours to ensure you were safely recovered." "What! How long has it been?" "Five minutes. I got bored.
The important thing about any book is that you have to have a good story and that it has to be exciting. Then it's nice to add other levels underneath that people can pick up on.
When I was young, I kept a diary for about 10 years and I had to write in it every day. Even on days when nothing seemed to happen, I made myself think of something to put in it.
Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.
Then again, Solomon was human. And that meant he was flawed (Go on, take a look at yourself in the mirror. A good long look, if you can bear it. See? Flawed's putting it mildly, isn't it?)
Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.
When I think about my ideal free day, it usually involves going into London and sitting in a nice coffeehouse with cake and coffee, but I would probably still have my notebook in my pocket.
I like using traditional beliefs in my fantasies, even though I always end up warping them to suit my purpose: it somehow makes everything feel more 'solid' if it's got a long history behind it.
If anyone else asked that question, O He Who Is Terrible and Great, I would have said they were an ignorant fool; in you it is a sign of the disarming simplicity which is the fount of all virtue.
Me, I was still in the pygmy hippo in a skirt, singing lusty songs about Solomon's private life and a giant stone back and forth through the air as I climbed out of the quarry at the edge of the site.
As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.
We grow up being told about great figures in our society, and as you get older you have to question the stories you've been told and decide if these great figures are indeed as great as you've been told.
I had a chance at him now. Things were a bit more even. He knew my name, I knew his. He had six years' experience, I had five thousand and ten. That was the kind of odds that you could do something with.
He was a worried man (I'm stretching the term a bit here, I know. By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night).
I used to have quite long hair, and I decided that I wanted to get it cut. I'd never met the person who did it, and she cut it into some kind of dreadful mullet. It looked like a triangle on my head. The other kids were merciless.
It's the same with spirit guises; show me a sweet little choirboy or a smiling mother and I'll show you the hideous fanged strigoi it really is. (Not always. Just sometimes. *Your* mother is absolutely fine, for instance. Probably.)