Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

One man sees a riselka: his life forks there. Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die. Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.

Irritation for some men was their response to strain.

When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the 'recline' in recliner.

I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.

I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale.

I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.

In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

That felt strange. How sharp a rent a handful of moments made in the fabric of a life.

I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.

I ruefully admit that if the cat is asleep in my chair - which she regards as hers, of course - I tend to leave her there and take the other one.

How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.