Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

I will not say I am sorry, but I can tell you that I grieve.

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.

I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing.

The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.

It is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had.

Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

I had been obsessed with the Arthurian legends all my life, and I knew that that would work its way into any trilogy I wrote. I was fascinated by the Eddas, the Norse and Icelandic legends, Odin on the world tree.

When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.

Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.

I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively.

Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.

We are not gods. We make mistakes. We do not live very long. Sometimes someone grinds ink, mixes it with water, arranges paper, takes up a brush to record our time, our days, and we are given another life in those words.