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

Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that what passes for realism in movies has nothing to do with reality and that my stuff is more realistic than that.

In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.

Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.

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.