Antony Johnston Quotes

It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.

I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.

Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

The fantasy world, the 'Game of Thrones' world, the forgotten realms worlds - they're the type of worlds I've always wanted to live in. Where vampires, dragons, dwarves and elves are real.

Gemmell's name guarantees a satisfying story and a thumping good read. I recommend all his heroic creations - 'Druss the axeman,' 'the Jerusalem man,' among others - but my favourite has to be 'Waylander': Clint Eastwood with a crossbow and the same 'Make my day, punk' attitude.

Adult fantasy gets a bad name. You think of Xena - Warrior Princess. If you don't do it expensively, it becomes tacky and you end up just appealing to 45-year-old single men.

I read H.P. Lovecraft. I also like Sword and Sorcery stuff, Arthurian legend.

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.

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.

I'd never heard of the 'Lord of the Rings', actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, 'Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?'

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.

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.

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.

I read 'The Hobbit' when I was twenty and first reading modern science fiction and fantasy. I followed it up with 'The Lord of the Rings,' which I still reread from time to time, but of the lot of it, I prefer 'The Hobbit.'

I hadn't watched 'Lord of the Rings' - I'm gonna get so much flack for this, but I hadn't watched 'Lord of the Rings' when I started watching 'Game of Thrones.'

I love reading epic fantasies and big fat books and so I really wanted to write one. I think you always write what you want to read.

'Game of Thrones' has multiple story lines, multiple countries, and it's complete fantasy.

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

'The Black Prism' is a story of emperors and prisoners and magic set in a Mediterranean, 1600-esque world. It's a fantasy story; it's fast and fun and inventive.

I've always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons... I was always drawn to those types of stories.

I write a kind of surreal fantasy, but they can't put 'surreal fantasy' on a paperback.

Beneath the Sugar Sky' is an homage to the portal fantasies of my childhood: it is the portal running in reverse.

When I started reading George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, it was the late 1990s and obsessing over fantasy novels was (if painful memory serves) a super-nerdy thing to do.

With 'Game of Thrones' you're not really dealing with anything that is based in reality. You have dragons and magic and all of that.