Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

Sometimes you didn’t really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

I never answer, because I can’t, which is my favorite among my own books.

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.

Even if we remember the past, odds are good we’ll still repeat it.

We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

One didn’t stop to talk with creatures from one’s nightmares.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That’s one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that’s unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.

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.

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.

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.

Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true!

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don’t think there’s any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry – if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

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.

The heart has its own laws… and the truth is… the truth is that you are the law of mine.

In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing.

A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done . . . something.

But if you couldn’t do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves… that never goes away.

My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us – what Talmudic scholars once called ‘the unwanted gaze.’ Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I’ve written often on the subject.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples – and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the ‘recline’ in recliner.

I’ve spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

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.

When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.