I will never let Berkley commit treason, ever,” Maximus said, “but if he did, I would step on anyone who tried to hang him.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense – better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I’d always known and just hadn’t ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I’d never understood.

That man with my brother is an envoy.

After a moment, he said, in almost marveling tones, ‘Are you deranged?

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake – all the cake – and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment:.

I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.

So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. I’d been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don’t mean a token of my regard.

Elsie eyed him puzzledly, and then offered, “Would you like to see my plate?