Robert Kazinsky Quotes

I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi. It was really all I read - anything from 'Dragonlance,' when I was 12, to 'The Wheel of Time' and Robert Jordan stuff, to George R.R. Martin, who did 'Game of Thrones.'

Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.

I don't think there's any show comparable to 'Game of Thrones' in terms of the way it does the fantasy element to such a high standard: everything is created with so much care and detail. You really feel like you are transported into this entirely other fictional place.

For a variety of reasons, my books struck the marketplace like a thunderclap; and one of those reasons was that there were so few alternatives available. Readers who loved Tolkien, and who were not satisfied by Terry Brooks, had nowhere else to turn.

I was heavily influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, C. S. Friedman, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, R. A. Salvatore, and James Clavell to name a few, but of course every book I've ever read, whether I liked it or not, has had an influence... I think I am constantly evolving as a writer, but not to mimic anyone else or mainstream trends.

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

'The Sword of Shannara' is about two brothers who find themselves on an epic quest to save humanity. It borrows from 'Lord of the Rings' but is still original in its own right. I read it in three days, then reread it, then went out and found every single book Terry Brooks ever wrote, and read all those.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

I was a huge bookworm as a kid, and you could usually find me reading something with a dragon on its cover.

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.

If you take 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' as books, one is written for children, and one is an adult's book.

I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

I've always been a sci-fi/fantasy guy. My book reports in school, whenever you didn't have to do it on Shakespeare, I did it on, like, Piers Anthony and Raymond Feist.

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.

Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings.

When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.

'Game of Thrones' has multiple story lines, multiple countries, and it's complete fantasy.

Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.

If fantasy is done well, it has both serious content in a literary fashion and is a really good read as well - and children and young adults won't suffer anything else.

Guy Gavriel Kay's 'Tigana' is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. It's beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.