As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?

Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.

People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.

I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

No one is ever ordinary.

It gets cold in the desert at night particularly up in the mountains the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.

The guilty are always the most prone to establish complementary guilt and the most unforgiving thereafter.

No one asks a robot what he wants.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Music is not man's invention, but his heritage from the blessed spirits.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

The Internet makes it possible for people like me to live the way I do now. Without it, I'd have to be in New York or some other city. I think the Internet is the greatest invention in history after antibiotics.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

Never keep a line of retreat: it is a wretched invention.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.