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My idea of a good fantasy is something that's absolutely grounded in reality. And there's a little element that doesn't belong there - and that's the fantasy element - that you have to react to and deal with in a completely real way.

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

I think of myself as a fantasy writer.

I'm half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

It's my job, to create a fantasy.

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

I often look at places and kind of mentally convert them to fantasy versions of themselves.

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.