Quotes by Terri Windling

• What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.
• 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.
• My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.
• Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.
• Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.
• 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!
• There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
• I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.
• 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.
• I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.
• But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.
• I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.
• A good novel editor is invisible.
• 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.
• I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.
• I was a great fan of Jim Henson.
• 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.
• 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'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.
• I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.
• I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.
• Filmmaking can be a fine art.