“The truth: after just one novel, I had lost touch with my muse. The quietly desperate, jaded girl in my head had stopped slinging sardonic wit into my psyche.”

“Four AM last call proved to me that the late-night hours had a mystical, ethereal quality ripe with dangerous possibilities.”

“Shopping eased the pain. -Hailey, Retail Therapy”

“Just as all writers were beginners once, so were all novels. They all went through rough stages, even the ones by our most hallowed masters.”

“As we stood there, chest high in water, I felt like I was in the middle of my own romance novel.”

“The world is one unending chess match, my dear, and I am the one playing it how I please. I poke and prod to move my pieces to places I find desirable. And the defiant ones who resist me I simply remove from the board." He pulled up his right sleeve, showing Laura a sheathed dagger strapped to his arm. "But you, Laura, are not of this chess match at all. You walked unexpectedly onto my board, scattering my pieces out of the way, the ones that I had worked on so tirelessly to arrange to perfection.”

“Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world's pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people; it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist - the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life.”