Graham Joyce Quotes

If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses.

I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

I love fairy tale retellings and mash-ups.

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a copy editor at Doubleday, and for a brief period, it was my job to help shepherd Pat Conroy's 'Beach Music' into the world.

To me, the best comedies get a little dark, and the best thrillers are a little bit funny. So I'm not exactly sure where I draw the line between the two.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story's characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That's why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.

I was writing fantasy as soon as I could hold a pen.

Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.

So often, I think shows get into these grooves where they know the characters hit, and they just write for it over and over and over again.

The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.

I love anything that's mythical, and fantasy is one of my favourite genres.

I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story 'The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat' won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.

I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.

Yes, I've won prizes for putting words on a computer.

No one sets out to write escapism as a film's subject matter unless, maybe, you are making a fantasy flick.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

I start writing with an open mind without thinking about genre and realise, only after writing, that it falls under many genres.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

It is difficult to survive as an author in Sweden, so for commercial success, it is good idea to write crime, get yourself translated, and live happily ever after.

The reality is that much of the stuff you see in film, television, comics, and children's cartoons got its start inside the inspired, disruptive halls of science-fiction and fantasy literature.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.