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A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

I've always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons... I was always drawn to those types of stories.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

I definitely read a lot of books on the psychology and mythology behind fairy tales because I think that's really fascinating and there's a lot to draw on there.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

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.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.