Fantasy Tropes Quotes

I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.

Beneath the Sugar Sky' is an homage to the portal fantasies of my childhood: it is the portal running in reverse.

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

I've read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.

Readers seem to really like the fact that what I'm writing is not traditional fantasy.

I don't have a specific message for 'The Grace of Kings' and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.

I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.

I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.

As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there's no rigour to it.

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?

The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time.

Let me say it up front: I don't like bad hair or capes. I'm not into witches, warlocks or elves. I would never try to claim prog rock is cool. But I love it. And I know I'm not the only one.

When someone writes something dazzlingly brilliant, people want to imitate it. The result is a lot of less-than-brilliant knock-offs. Elves, Dwarves, Goblin army, cursed ring, evil sorcerer. Tolkien did it. It rocked. Let's move on. Let's do something new.

The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.

Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.

There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it.

Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic.

Adult fantasy gets a bad name. You think of Xena - Warrior Princess. If you don't do it expensively, it becomes tacky and you end up just appealing to 45-year-old single men.

It's hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there's all these 'rules' I'm supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines.

I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.

Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.

I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things.

I got a crash-course education in urban fantasy. I suddenly had to look up all these other writers I was supposed to be in a genre with. I instantly had to become an expert in this genre I knew almost nothing about.