Marie Brennan Quotations

When I'm working on a novel, I generally do write every day, but in between those marathons, I take breaks. My brain needs time to recharge.

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

My mood depends heavily on what happens to me right after I get up.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.

At one point in the 'Onyx Court' series, I think during 'In Ashes Lie', I suggested that Lune might come to love someone else eventually. Which was me pushing back against the narrative trope that people only get one True Love in their entire lives - an idea I think is kind of pernicious - but in retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it there.

There was a brief period of time when I was very young where I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian - largely because I liked cats - but then somebody told me I would have to cut animals open, and that was the end of that.

I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

I'm the sort of person who, once I put dragons into the real world, feels obliged to think about how their presence would have changed history.

I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

I read a lot of the 'Pern books' growing up - basically up through 'All the Weyrs of Pern,' maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she's probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.

I didn't really distinguish between genre and not-genre as a kid, until I made the transition to adult fantasy via Terry Brooks.

I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.

Schools are compulsory for about ten years of a person's life. They are, perhaps, the only compulsory institutions for all citizens, although those with full membership in schools are not yet treated as full citizens of our society...

But coming to terms with one’s sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another.

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.