Interview Quotes

“It doesn't matter what you read. What matters is you read. Whether it’s Tolstoy or Twilight, Kierkegaard or Betty and Veronica, keep reading, and don’t ever let somebody else—anybody—have a say about, or try to control, what you choose to learn from and/or escape into.”
― Trent Zelazny

“What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.”
― M. John Harrison

“I find it’s more fun to write about something that you don’t know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine...once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you’re fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube)”
― Norman Mailer

“It was like murdering two of your children. I try to make the readers feel they’ve lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it’s a superficial experience isn’t it?”
― George R.R. Martin

“Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.”
― Andy Behrman, Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania

“Today, it's possible to read both erotica and books written for children without fear of social castigation.”
― Amelia Gray

“An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!”
― Maggie Reese, Runaway Mind: My Own Race With Bipolar Disorder

“He needed no foreplay for the interview, and I was grateful. It's like sweet-talking your date when you both know you're about to get laid.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I’m always reading books—as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Writing every day is very, very helpful, but set the bar at a place where you have no excuse: It doesn't matter how tired you are, how late it is, you will do it. So if you say, "I will write one hundred words a day" — set the bar there, and then you can actually get over that bar.”
― N.D. Wilson

“Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns”
― Stephen Baxter

“I’ve read science fiction and fantasy all my life – though when you’re a child, they just call that “books.” The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren’t genre, they’re just Tuesday afternoon. I had no idea that I was writing fantasy at first, because I was so saturated in Greek literature that it never occurred to me that my talking animals and sentient mazes were anything but realism. Our instinct toward folklore and magical stories, parables and imagining the future, are as much a part of the human experiences as divorce, grief, falling in love, politics, or raising children. I’ve always read fantastic literature, because it’s always seemed truest to me. It makes the metaphorical literal and is all the more powerful for that immediacy and directness. I love genre fiction for the infinite expanse of stories it can tell – and it’s been my constant companion since I was a very small child.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“what I want to show in my books and in my life is that you don't have to be like the miserable, angry people who hurt you. You can survive and, most of all, you can thrive. Yes, those demons will always be there, and you will hear and, worst of all, feel their cruelty long after they're gone, but you don't have to let them own your future the way they held your past. You don't have to become like them. You can pull it together, hold your head high, and be the person you want to be in spite of their vicious cruelty.

They say that there's a reason to everything. I'm not sure I believe that. It's human nature to try and make order out of chaos. The "sometimes things have to go wrong in order to go right" is my own search for understanding why cruelty takes place. I don't understand how anyone can intentionally hurt another person, never mind a child. But I want to help others find the rainbow through the storms. To know that tomorrow is another day and that sooner or later, life will get better. And so will we.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon

“I happen to believe that the deepest value of fiction is that, in its very fictiveness, it is the one arena where we can, at least temporarily, take apart and refuse to compete within the terms that the rest of existence insists on. Market value may come to drive out all other human values, except, perhaps, in the country of invented currency, the completely barter-driven economy of the imagination. Fiction, when it remembers its innate priority over other human transactions, can deal not in price but in worth. And that seems to me an act filled with political potential, as well as with pleasure.”
― Richard Powers

“I hate superheroes. I always hated superheroes. From the time I was a little kid, I could believe in a 50-foot gorilla trashing New York City before I could believe a guy would put on long tights and bat ears and go and fight crime. Like, the fantasy never made sense to me, on a basic level.”
― Stephen Bissette

“For me the genre of romance is about the characters. It’s about following a journey between two people and watching them grow and develop and have their lives change for the better because of their presence in each other’s world.”
― Samantha Young

“I think sometimes in literature we kind of police ourselves. I know a lot of people talked about Twilight, and they would say, oh, but the heroine, she lets this man make her decisions. And I thought, that may not be the particular fantasy or trope that works for me.

But listen man, I read Wuthering Heights. I wanted me a little Heathcliff action. I mean, why can't we indulge that fantasy and also be like, “And now I would like the ERA passed, please. Also, this lipstick is fuckin' killer.”
― Libba Bray

“Piracy is the new radio.”
― Neil Young

“If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.”
― Markus Zusak

“Not everyone can be relaxed or comfortable enough to seriously listen to the (debate or interview) answers.”
― Jim Lehrer, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates

“[T]o give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. But they’re not being given a world to escape to … the world of the imagination. Children must have an escape line somewhere.”
― Nicholas Stuart Gray

“If someone likes my fiction more for the quality of my prose rather than the quality of my storytelling, I'm doing something wrong.”
― Jamie Ford