Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

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.
As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.
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.
Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.
Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true!
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 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 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 have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.
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AuthorName
Guy Gavriel Kay
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BirthDate
07 November, 1954
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Canada
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