Fantasy

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams.  It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real…for a moment at least…that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli.  Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab.  Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer.  Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.  Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark.  Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot.  Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines.  Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think.  To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang.  There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven.  When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle Earth.

-George R. R. Martin, The Faces of Fantasy

Success

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

-Winston Churchill

On the value of hard work

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

-The back of a guy’s shirt in D-Hall

Yes

We can.

Mel Brooks

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

-Mel Brooks

Editors: Writers’ Natural Enemies

I’ve often heard writers ask other writers why there have to be editors in the world.

As it happens, I know the answer. If there were no editors in the world, writers would be very happy. They would frolic and play, and publish every word they wrote and they would have lots of money and lots of sex, since they would be very famous and very charming having never experienced rejection. Their egos would fill up the world, their books would be everywhere, and they would mate furiously and produce lots of little writers, who would no doubt write lots of little books.

This would never do. It would unbalance the ecology. So editors were put into the world to keep down the writer population.

-George R. R. Martin, on editors, full text at http://www.georgerrmartin.com/sp-goh79.html

A hot shower in February

“The Author would like to thank Professor William D. Phillips, Jr., for History 3714, the most useful four hundred dollars and ten weeks I ever spent in school; Pat “Oh, c’mon, it’ll be fun” Wrede for the letter game that first drew the proto-Cazaril, blinking and stumbling, from my back-brain into the light of day; and, I suppose, the utility companies of Minneapolis for that hot shower one cold February, where the first two items collided unexpectedly in my head to create a new world and all the people in it.”

-Front inside cover of The Curse of Chalion, by Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Swift and Cherryh

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

-Jonathan Swift

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

-C. J. Cherryh

Flash Fiction

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

-Ernest Hemingway

Probably old news to most writers, but having never seen any flash fiction before, this literally stunned me.

Favorite ending to any book ever

The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. . . . Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. . . . The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. . . . She pulled in her horizon like a great fishnet. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God