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It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conju...more

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And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

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Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten...more

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enter the world of things as they are

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There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

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Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the pla...more

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The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and danc...more

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My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each...more

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Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie tha...more

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I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a ...more

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Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit,...more

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The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and yo...more

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The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and danc...more

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The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best p...more

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I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into...more