Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

For me, the goal is always to write a novel that I myself would like to read. People frequently ask me what my favorite book is, and in effect, there's always a capital-F Favorite, capital-B Book that I would like to write myself someday. I try to go for that ideal of writing the best, most entertaining, most beautifully written book that I possibly can.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.