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What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.

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.

It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.

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

Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.