Robin McKinley

Not all honey_ she had concluded_ had a specific use beyond what all honey is good for, sweetness and salves. But this honey, it was somehow so strong that it must be for something, though she had still not learnt what it was. The best she had come to was that this honey was for joy...

It is not so easy as running and not running.

But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.

It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.

As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

I don't put up with being messed around, and I don't suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I'm a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.

When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.

...there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.

I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I've also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I'm getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older _ gardening, bell ringing... piano playing... And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me _ how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises).

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.

Sylvi wished she could gouge out the look in Dorogin's stony eyes, and change the course of history. She wished Fthoom had been eaten by a sea monster.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

Swords. That is no faenorn ; that is slaughter._ The Grand Seneschal shrugged. __he Master did not protest. And, indeed, what weapon could he have suggested that would suit him any better?_ __ire,_ she said. __e would not,_ said the Seneschal. __ou know he would not.