Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.
I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I’m me.
[His response to a TIME magazine article crediting J.K. Rowling with reinventing the fantasy genre]: “Ever since “The Lord of the Rings” revitalized the genre, writers have played with it, reinvented it, subverted it and bent it to their times. It has also contained some of the very best, most accessible writing for children, by writers who seldom get the acknowledgement they deserve”.
[His response to J.K. Rowling saying she wasn’t aware that her “Harry Potter” books were fantasy until they were finished]: “I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, and hidden worlds would have given her a clue?”
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods. They have not forgotten this.
The baby boomers are getting older and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can’t so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided one backbone of care?
“Twinkle twinkle little star….” What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!
They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.
The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.
Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.
There are those who say that sherry should not be drunk early in the morning. They are wrong.
You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abscesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say “yes.”
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Ultimate Doom (1993), no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
Everyone’s heard of Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go…
As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book … But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe.
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking I assume, said it was an act of God. You shouldn’t say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories.
I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you.
It’s amazing how much of fantasy is rearranging the furniture in Tolkein’s attic.
They don’t teach you the facts of death, your Mum and Dad. They give you pets.
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