Quotes from Jonathan Stroud

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!

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 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 got fairly good grades, but I was bad at woodwork. They said I tried hard, but the result was hopeless.

A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

What, are you queuing now? Just how British are you people? Don't just stand in line! Kill somebody!

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.

Burned and squashed to death in a silver vat of soup. There must be worst ways to go. But not many.

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.

I wasn't pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn't my profession.

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.

But I do get afraid. It's just that fear makes me sort of . . . angry and resentful, and I bite back at it. It's hard to describe." It isn't hard to describe, you idiot," Aud said. "It's called courage.

The column hung above the middle of the pentacle, bubbling ever upward against the ceiling like the cloud of an erupting volcanoe. There was a barely perceptible pause. Then two yellow staring eyes materialized in the heart of the smoke. Hey, it was his first time. I wanted to scare him. And it did, too.

We communicated with pithy, rather monosyllabic thoughts: viz. Run, Jump, Where? Left, Up, Duck, ect. (This latter was an observation I made on the edge of a lake. Nathaniel unfortunately took it as a command, which resulted in our temporary immersion.) We didn't ever quite say Ug, but it was a close-run thing.

Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.

This was classic Lockwood. Friendly, considerate, empathetic. My personal impulse would have been to slap the girl soundly around the face and boot her moaning backside out into the night. Which is why he's the leader, and I'm not. Also why I have no female friends.

Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost," George said. "Now that's what I call a busy evening." Lockwood nodded. "To think some people just watch television.

Ah, you coward! Look at you, running." "Actually, it's called improvising.

It was one of those moments when a great Don't Care wave hits you, and you float off on it, head back, looking at the sky.

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.

Pardon me, Highness, a women waits whithout." "Whithout what?

That's usually how they start, the young ones. Meaningless waffle.

You think so?" The boy looked down at his cross-legged form. He was sitting straight-backed, legs folded neatly in the manner of an Egyptian scribe. "It's two thousand, one hundred and twenty-nine years since Ptolemy died," he said. "He was fourteen. Eight world empires have risen up and fallen away since that day, and I still carry his face. Who do you think's the lucky one?