Judith Tarr

“I like going back in time and writing historical fantasy. I use some real historical characters as a background to give depth to the fantasy. And I throw my fictional characters into the midst of this, and, so far, it has turned out interesting.”

“So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.”

“The more facts one introduces, the more truth one shows, the more determined the bigot is to cling to his belief.”

“Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.”

“Some books are a revelation. They come along at just the right time for just the right reasons. They become heart books and soul books.”

“A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.”

“Rawn did her own thing in her own way. She cast the female gaze on a genre heavy with all-male quest fellowships, trophy females, and the occasional Smurfette. Her world was male-dominated and highly patriarchal, but she populated it with notable numbers of well-drawn female characters.”

“I don’t cry for humans. I cry for things that are so beautiful I just can’t stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of half-chewed hay and eyes that knew everything I’d ever thought or felt or been.”

“Yes, I do have a soft spot for complicated villains who can't help themselves.”

“It's sad when a woman writing fantasy in the United States in the 1970s has less actual feminist cred than Sir Walter Scott.”

“Agni was her brother and she loved him, and he often understood her, but he was a man. In the end he thought as a man thinks, of owning and mastering.”

“If it were left to men, there'd be nothing in the world but mating and squabbling.”

“Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.”

“Separation of Church and state was a radical idea when the U.S. was first founded, but it's become The Way Things Are.”

“Magic is what it is, and those who work it can be male or female; it doesn't matter. What matters is power.”

“The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.”