Paul Di Filippo Quotes

I realize that, to many readers, Hard Fantasy may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Fantasy, according to most generally recognized definitions, differs from both 'real world' fiction and 'science fiction' in that magic or magical creatures are active elements.

I love all of mythology and rules pertaining to all of the monsters, but I like to go the extra step.

Vampires were an excellent springboard. I still love them; they fascinate me.

I've always been fascinated by mythology or, in modern parlance, by X-Men or vampires.

I believe in elves and giants. I believe that fairy tales are nothing more than news reports of what once happened.

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.

I remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.'

Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.

I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.

Superheroes are modern mythological characters, so you're going to make them look impossible. Even my Krypto The Superdog is the idealisation of the canine form.

The genre of fantasy is about magic and occult characters.

Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

When I wrote 'The Good Fairies of New York,' I wasn't really imagining that there were fairies. Not in the way that I'm really imagining there are werewolves.

Irish mythology is gorgeous, and so are the fairies, but they are very misrepresented in the U.K. They are not little creatures with wings.

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.

I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs.

The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.

The minute that you bring a unicorn into a story, you know that it's a fairy tale or a fable, because unicorns don't exist as animals. They exist as fantasy creatures.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.

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'm always wondering, if Bigfoot's not real, then why does this creature show up in all these different cultures? I'm always fascinated by that kind of stuff.

One thing that's a lot harder to put into stories than you'd think is the idea of a traditional monster, because monsters with a capital 'M' don't inherently lend themselves to a story about your character. Unless one of your characters is themselves the monster, simply having a monster leads to a chase or a hunt.