Terri Windling Quotes

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

People don't like to say Fantasy they say Magic Realism which means Fantasy written by somebody I went to university with.

I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice - their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that over-used term 'magical realism.' It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much, we don't know what it means anymore.

Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.

Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

Literature precedes genre.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it!

One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

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

I love fiction that sounds like fact. As a matter of fact, I also like fact that sounds like fiction.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

What others call magic realism is normal and an everyday thing to me.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.