Liz Williams Quotes

I am quite spiritual. I believed in the fairies when I was a child. I still do sort of believe in the fairies. And the leprechauns. But I don't believe in God.

Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.

The evergreen played an influential role in the spiritual life of early societies throughout the world. Archaeological and anthropological evidence indicates that veneration of the tree dates from at least 4000 years before Christ … These pagan beliefs survive to this day embedded in religious rituals and myths as well as secular customs, legends and fairy tales

There's lots of Tolkien that must be confusing to people.

In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.

The ku-magic is a very ancient magic. It predates Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

Everyone in the '80s was reading Tolkien; he invented this whole medieval fantasy genre.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

I am not religious in any way, but I have a pagan ideology and pagan values.

In earlier cultures with pagan belief systems, light and dark were celebrated equally, people were around death a lot. In contemporary Western culture, we don't have that, and horror is a place you can be immersed in it.

My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.'

From the beginning of time, we've told stories, Shamans and Medicine People, and not to be pompous about it, but I feel like that is the lineage I take down and where I come from. There is magic to storytelling.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.

I read a lot of fantasy and grew up on 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek.' I loved going to Middle Earth. 'Dungeons & Dragons' was a huge influence.

My college roommate gave me her copy of 'Lord of the Rings,' and I read that probably five or six times - not because I think it's the greatest thing ever written, though some people certainly think it is - but the world he creates is so vivid. So real that he designed its own languages, history and mythology.

I'm pagan.

The fey in this country keep to themselves, and are a separate nation, much like the American Indians, but with even more autonomy.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

Without Merlin, there would be no Gandalf, so I see them as the same thing, one a continuation of the other.

I would love to have written Roger Zelazny's first five books of 'Amber.' What a great idea he had about the shadings of reality!

I've found a more personal, pagan kind of religion to satisfy the spiritual side of things.