Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality – for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.
We’re all misfits herefrom our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.
The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it’s not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing.
We’ve always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It’s no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.
The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul.
I’ve only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don’t count my student years.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn’t have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
A good novel editor is invisible.
Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.