Jim C. Hines Quotes

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.

Of the authors published under Ballantine's Adult Fantasy logo, only Evangeline Walton 'spoke' to me.

I really respect and admire Tolkien. I think he was the most honest of the Romantics.

You have so many sources to draw on when you're a fantasy writer.

This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.

I would wanna be a mermaid, but I think I'm a little bit more of a unicorn, because I'm like a little bit more horsey.

Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.

O for a horse with wings!

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.

I've read fantasy my whole life. Quite literally; my mom read me The Hobbit before I could read stuff to myself. So I love fantasy; that's what I read for fun, it's what I read professionally to keep abreast of what's in the genre - it's where my heart is.

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.

Earth and sea merged, the sea tossed itself in the air in a fantastic dance, into the shapes of men and horses and tattered banners. I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.

Terry Pratchett's right up my alley ... give him a try!

All great novels are great fairy tales.

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It's an unfortunate piece of Tolkien's legacy. Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story.

Great gandalfs ghost! if he had a ghost. i doubt it. he was such a snob.

There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

I have to say that my kids, like every child in America, is completely absorbed with Harry Potter. And so, I have gotten sucked into it, too; I can't wait for the next one to come out. I am trying to figure out what happens with Harry and Voldemort. So we have been reading that.

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.

Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic.