Quotes from Patrick Rothfuss

One of them had a large wooden sign nailed to its door proclaiming, NO SYMPATHY! I wondered what non-arcane visitors might think of the warning.

I have no balance. My life is a hot mess.

I've done a lot of interviews of the last few years, and I've actually started a list of questions that it would be fun to ask an author, but no respectable interviewer would ever ask. Since I'm not respectable, I'm going to start doing interviews with some authors I know, just for fun.

"I will admit, I've never had a student offer himself up for a vicious beating in order to prove he's worth my time." "This was nothing... Once I jumped off a roof."

But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?

Coming to grips with being a bit of a celebrity. That's not anything I ever expected to have to deal with in my life.

When someone tells you a piece of their life, they're giving you a gift, not granting you your due.

I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

I know better than to read reviews but I do it anyway. Somebody described my pacing as 'glacial.' I wasn't thrilled, but I think they meant it in a not entirely unflattering way.

If you fall, you fall, " Elodin shrugged. "Sometimes falling teaches us things too." In dreams you often fall before you wake.

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

You've got a great chance in college to do all sorts of terrible irresponsible things, and you should totally do them. I mean, make huge mistakes. This is the time in your life if you screw up, it's okay because you can bounce back from it.

It's not prowess if you watch 5 hours of TV a day. It's just how you choose to spend your time.

We need time to relax and enjoy ourselves too, no matter how dark the story. The occasional humorous moment helps with that. That's one of the things that Joss Whedon excels at in his storytelling.

He taught only one class: 'Unlikely Maths'. But since the time was listed as "now" and the place, "everywhere," this was hardly helpful in tracking him down.

But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. This is rare and pure and perfect.

After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.

I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.

A tree doesn't make a thunderstorm, but any fool knows where lightning's going to strike.

The problem with dragons is that everyone uses them. All the time. When that happens, they become commonplace. A lot of people think you can just throw them into a story and suddenly whatever you're writing is 28% cooler. But that doesn't work. All that does is make dragons into some boring cliche.

Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead.