Words matter. These are the best Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.
Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true!
I don’t know a writer who doesn’t feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren’t there.
I never answer, because I can’t, which is my favorite among my own books.
I don’t plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.
I had been obsessed with the Arthurian legends all my life, and I knew that that would work its way into any trilogy I wrote. I was fascinated by the Eddas, the Norse and Icelandic legends, Odin on the world tree.
Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.
We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don’t think there’s any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry – if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.
There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves… that never goes away.
When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.
After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.
I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.
When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the ‘recline’ in recliner.
The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form… is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace… all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to – certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art – novelists are buying into it wholesale.
The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That’s how ‘Beyond This Dark House’ appeared.
Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.
Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That’s one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that’s unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.
I’ve spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.
