Quotes from Liz Williams

Just so that we are clear on this, I am in favour of teaching children about different beliefs. I am not in favour of indoctrinating them in any particular belief, including my own: these issues should be presented as beliefs, not as fact.

I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.

You can, I think, have a quiet and steady protagonist and not run the risk of terminal dullness as long as exciting things happen to them and around them, and crime is the ideal genre for making this come about.

Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.

Some religious practitioners make absolutist claims for their beliefs: I've no interest in doing this, nor do I have any interest in converting people, which is doubtless a relief to anyone who has feared finding me on their doorstep asking if they'd like to know more about Odin.

I think that the power of the Silent Minute lies in its inherent lack of external direction: what participants actually do during that minute - prayer, contemplation, focus - is up to them.

There are a few people who are, let's say, personality-challenged, who would like to set up a cult, but in large part they fail due to the innate stroppiness and independence of their fellow pagans.

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'

I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.

Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.

For me, spiritual practice is a lot closer to art than science.

Because contemporary paganism is essentially so new, its underlying ethical structure is not particularly sophisticated.

In the matter of prejudice...we are all the same. Goddess and demon, human and monster: none of us understand difference, but at least some of us make the effort to try.

Stories don't always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that.

Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace. "Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically. "It is a bit excessive, isn't it?" "Who does it belong to?" "My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth.

as though the architect had tried to please everyone via the dubious method of insane and haphazard compromise.

There are those who want things made worse, not better, so that they can scavenge on the remnants. Remember what you know already: the human world is filled with predators.

But that was the way of it everywhere: there you were, getting on with things, minding your own business, and suddenly some arsehole decides to start a war.

had often occurred to Chen how shattering it must be for someone who had devoted their whole life to material possessions to suddenly find themselves in a world where status depended on entirely more intangible matters. He

There is an adage about bravery and foolishness being part of the same package.

The band of sickly scarlet light that passed for sunset in Hell ringed the horizon like a migraine

all gods were like that: the knife behind the smile, the drop of poison in the honey jar. They liked to bind you to them, make you dance on razorblades.

By keeping the price of treatment drugs artificially high, and making sure that only those who can afford it have the opportunity of a cure, we're actually supporting the work that the Ministry of Epidemics does. I mean, look at Africa and our liaison with the Underworld there.

The whole justification for having such a bureaucratic system in the first place is so that balance is maintained, and so that one institution doesn't benefit at the expense of all others. Imagine the chaos that would ensue on Earth and in Hell if the Ministry of War were perpetually triumphant! Humans would be decimated and half of Hell would be out of a job.