Guy Gavriel Kay Quotations

My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

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 have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I dont think theres 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.

Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.

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.

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.

I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.

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.

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.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

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.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true!

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 grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.

I never answer, because I can't, which is my favorite among my own books.

I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.

I ruefully admit that if the cat is asleep in my chair - which she regards as hers, of course - I tend to leave her there and take the other one.

I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.

Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.

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 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.

I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively.

In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing.

I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

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.

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.

It was different, though, knowing something in your thoughts and then hearing it confirmed, made real, planted in the world like a tree

Do you know the wish of your heart?" - The Darkest Road

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?

A hand fought best when it made a fist.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

Ice is for death and endings.

How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

We are the total of our longings.

When I'm all grown up, come what may, I'll build a boat to carry me away

Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future.

But if you couldn't do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

There was some sadness in how that could happen, falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had.

Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls.

Lazy poets try to elicit a reader's response with words designed to tug at the heart.

Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.

Why did becoming accustomed to something have to render its pleasures stale.

You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery.

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.

The military preferred - invariably - those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.

What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

It is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Irritation for some men was their response to strain.

One man sees a riselka: his life forks there.  Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die.  Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die. One woman sees a riselka: her path comes clear to her.  Two women see a riselka: one of them shall bear a child.  Three women see a riselka: one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176]

Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan.

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.

most hated by the dark, for their name is light.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Some writers later, describing the events of that night and day, wrote that Wan'yen of the Altai had seen a spirit-dragon of the river and become afraid. Writers do that sort of thing. They like dragons in their tales.

... everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.

I will not say I am sorry, but I can tell you that I grieve.

She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.

We must be what we are, or we become our enemies.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done . . . something.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

One didn't stop to talk with creatures from one's nightmares.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.