Quotes by Robin McKinley

“I like to assume that since I drive a car and maintain a respectable credit rating and rarely murder anyone and bury them in the back garden unless they really deserve it, that the fact that I hear voices wont unduly disturb anyone.”

“Rose Daughter.”

“I took my son to college,”

“By the way -- this is the most weve paid for gas on this trip, ... We were told that Georgia was the most expensive and it turned out to be the least expensive.”

“But if it would have been a vacation, we wouldnt have made it,”

I dont put up with being messed around, and I dont suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that Im a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and youre fussing that hes tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?It doesnt, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - dont 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 doesnt. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesnt have a clue that its a tree; its the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.

But Im going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts Im leav­ing out, because theres still stuff Im just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.

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

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 youre going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then youve 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 youre never going to write well enough. Of course thats what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.

When you write your first novel you dont really know what youre doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first Once upon a time. Im 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.

Im also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when Im 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 Ive also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and Im 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).

...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.

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.

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

[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.

It wasnt so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals werent, 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.)

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 Im prejudiced.