Quotes from Robin Hobb

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.

Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.

Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own. Wolves have no kings

There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome.

In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.

I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.'

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.

Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?

Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.

I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don't. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I've never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.

You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.

I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.

There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You can't undo yesterday's journey.

We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.