Most of my short stories are fantasy.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t want to open up my cornflakes and find that they’re full of pebbles… You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn’t.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

I sell escapism.

My imagination is a twisted place.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‚The Lord of the Rings‘ is intensely… landscaped. But ‚Discworld‘ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.