Quotes from Kate Forsyth

Only the lame could love and only the maimed could mourn

Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.

Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.

You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession.

Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones and bones of the past.

Sanitising stories, leaching out all of the sense of danger and the darkness out of the stories, actually reduces them and stops them from doing what they're supposed to do, which is teach us how to manage our lives.

Stories are the common ground that allow people to connect, despite all our defences and all our differences.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

We all want to win against all odds. We all want to be loved. We all wish it was possible to change our world and to make our world a better place.

Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up.

It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.

I have struggled all my life with my stuttering. Not to mention all my other speech impediments. I think I have every language disorder known to speech pathologists.