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" In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing. "

Guy Gavriel Kay

Writing

Book

I Am

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" Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it. "

" When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the 'recline' in recliner. "

" We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that. "

" I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing. "

" It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape. "

Guy Gavriel Kay

Shape

Lived

" I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people. "

" I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking. "

" I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme. "

" The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail. "

" After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy. "

" Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this. "

" My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject. "

" I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really. "

" I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively. "

" Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true! "

" As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space. "

" Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise. "

Guy Gavriel Kay

Begin

Consequences

" I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there. "

" Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world. "

" The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared. "

Guy Gavriel Kay

Friends

Book

" I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them. "

" I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all. "

" I never answer, because I can't, which is my favorite among my own books. "

" I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't. "

" I ruefully admit that if the cat is asleep in my chair - which she regards as hers, of course - I tend to leave her there and take the other one. "

" I had been obsessed with the Arthurian legends all my life, and I knew that that would work its way into any trilogy I wrote. I was fascinated by the Eddas, the Norse and Icelandic legends, Odin on the world tree. "

" When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling. "

Guy Gavriel Kay

Old

Innocent

" I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories. "

" Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale. "

" There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away. "