Words matter. These are the best Patrick Rothfuss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My mom once lost track of me at the zoo and when she found me I was lecturing a man about the difference between dromedary and Bactrian camels. I was about 3 1/2.
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’m struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic – if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? ‘David Copperfield’ is a big book – is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story – that’s the real appeal – if the story is long you have a better chance of becoming more connected.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that’s lacking in our regular lives.
Don’t get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That’s a story. Handled properly, it’s more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.
You don’t want the world destroyed, because, you know, that’s where your shoes are.
As authors, most – most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it’s like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.
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.
You can have an interesting story about a person living an interesting life. And if it’s done well, that is just as engaging as the end of the world. A million people dying – we can’t process. One person, we can process.
I’m a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.
I’ve got an idea for a modern day faerie tale that I think would made a great short novel. But I just don’t have the time to work on it right now. I’m way too busy with the ‘Kingkiller Chronicles’ and being a new dad.
It’s profoundly disorienting to go from zero to celebrity.
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.
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.
When you’re 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you’re 21 and you’ve read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren’t really good. OK, let’s be honest. A lot of them were crap.
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.
One thing I’ve learned now is that I should not say when a book is coming out until I’m sure I know.
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 was the kid who was too geeky for the other kids.
