Marie Brennan Quotes

Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.

For a variety of reasons, my books struck the marketplace like a thunderclap; and one of those reasons was that there were so few alternatives available. Readers who loved Tolkien, and who were not satisfied by Terry Brooks, had nowhere else to turn.

I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.

Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

I've read everything that Isaac Asimov ever wrote, for a start. I'm massively into my fantasy genre, anything by R.A. Salvatore or David Gemmell. I've read every single book those writers have written.

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!

Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.

I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

Robin McKinley's 'The Blue Sword' was a defining book of my teen years, and I'd love to have more books like that in the world.

If you take 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' as books, one is written for children, and one is an adult's book.

I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi. It was really all I read - anything from 'Dragonlance,' when I was 12, to 'The Wheel of Time' and Robert Jordan stuff, to George R.R. Martin, who did 'Game of Thrones.'

I've read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

What's interesting to me is how many vampire/urban fantasy authors are writing young adult series as well, often set in the same world as their adult books, but focused on a younger audience.

I was heavily influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, C. S. Friedman, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, R. A. Salvatore, and James Clavell to name a few, but of course every book I've ever read, whether I liked it or not, has had an influence... I think I am constantly evolving as a writer, but not to mimic anyone else or mainstream trends.

I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.

One of the interesting things about YA books - I don't know about Percy Jackson, but I do know about 'Twilight' and 'Maximum Ride': There are a lot of adult readers. In fact, we released 'Maximum Ride' both as a paperback for kids and as a mass release for adults.

In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.

Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings.

When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.