Charles de Lint Quotes

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

Genres are just names.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.

Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.

I hate the idea of genres.

I used to regard genres as being embedded in cliches, and I always felt funny about the need we have to label things. But I'm happy to think of 'Starred Up' as a prison drama, although we tried to smuggle in some elements of family drama in there.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

I don't know why people have to categorize things in music under music. It's music and it's music and it's music. When you start putting genres on things, I think it's completely ridiculous, and I hate that.

I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

I want people to get out of that nasty habit of needing a label. Every genre for each song is different.

It's impossible to talk without labels. "Dog" is a label, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless, nor does it mean there's no difference in a Shih Tzu and a Doberman.

I love the idea that all genres can have subsets.

I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

To pigeonhole a genre as being successful or unsuccessful is weird.

I love finding - or inventing - ways to categorize people.

Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

Genre, to me, is not all that important, and it never has been.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and 'Second Chance' was not an easy novel to define.