A biography for Guy Gavriel Kayhasn’t been written yet.
“It was different, though, knowing something in your thoughts and then hearing it confirmed, made real, planted in the world like a tree”
“No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.”
“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.”
“He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]”
“The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.”
“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.”
“I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.”
“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.”
“What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?”
“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.”
“As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.”
“It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.”
“I never answer, because I can't, which is my favorite among my own books.”
“There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.”
“He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.”
“[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.”
“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.”