I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.

I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.

I was a great fan of Jim Henson.

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a college student in England and Ireland.

A good novel editor is invisible.

I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.

I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.

I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

Filmmaking can be a fine art.

Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.

I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... except for Show Tunes.

Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.

One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.

We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.

There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.

My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.

We're all misfits herefrom our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.

I now hate actors that blink too much on screen. When people blink, I turn the movie off. So I don't blink at all.

I'm Jewish, but not overly religious, and have certainly never formally observed the Fourth Commandment, other than via the tradition of wearing white on Friday nights at summer camp, which never seemed to dovetail with the fact that Fridays were also the night for grape juice.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at 'The Mountain View Voice,' my hometown newspaper.

If you want to be happy be.

I can tell you I can work on four or five hours of sleep a night and cat nap all day, and I can go for 8 or 10 days on the road, and it doesn't seem to affect me.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.

The stuff that made me mad 20 years ago doesn't really make me mad any more.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days - we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote.

The imposing edifice of science provides a challenging view of what can be achieved by the accumulation of many small efforts in a steady objective and dedicated search for truth.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

I used to stay up at night and sneak into the TV room, past my parents, who were asleep, to watch Saturday Night's 'Main Event.' That's how I started watching SNL. On accident.

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

Growing up, my ideals were Barbra Streisand, Cher, and my mom.

St. Louis has always been special to me.

Wisconsin's kids shouldn't be allowed to fail just because Washington is failing them.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Depression is a horrible, potentially life-threatening illness - but the lives it threatens are almost always those of the people who suffer from it.