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"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool."
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"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."

"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."

"Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ..."

"In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate."

"The reader is probably wondering that if Tolkien did indeed fashion two of his heroic characters from Catholic prophecies, what about the evil protagonists? Were any of them inspired by these little-known revelations concerning future times? The answer is yes, but to discover the links between the myth and the prophecies, we must venture not only into the realm of unnerving revelations, but also into the murky world of secret sects, dark plots, occult signs, bloody revolutions and conspiracy theories ~ we must probe deep into the burning Eye of Sauron."

"Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense."

"I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde."

"She found as always that words on paper proved themselves, they were so beautifully true."

"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time - proof that humans can work magic."
Explore more quotes by Steven Brust


"But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision."


"There are millions of ways for people to die, if you number each vital organ, each ways it can fail, all the poisons from the earth and the sea which can cause these failures."


"The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest."


"Every once in while, a person will do something obvious and direct that is no more than it appears to be. I think they do it to throw you off."


"To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity."
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