Fantasy Authors

"Yemi meets my eyes with a hatred that impales me like a sword. Though her mouth never opens, her voice rings in my skull. “Safe ended a long time ago.”"

"(Chapter Eleven)"

"He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy’s rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate"

"(Chapter Two )"

"You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. Mama Agba’s words from this morning seep into my head."

"I don’t know what disturbs me more: that I killed him, or that I could do it again. Strike, Amari. A thin whisper of father’s voice plays in my ears."

"I arch my eyebrow at Amari and think back to her mention of a training accident. I assumed the scar came from her brother’s sword, but was she holding a sword, too? Despite her escape from Lagos, I can’t imagine the princess locked in battle."

"(Chapter Five )"

"It avoids rather than hurts, it hurts rather than maims, it maims rather than kills—the staff does not destroy.” “I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war. I give you the strength to fight, but you all must learn the strength of restraint.” Mama turns to me, shoulders pinned back. “You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. That is the way of the staff."

"Fool yourself all you want, little prince, but don’t feign innocence with me. I won’t let your father get away with what he’s done. I won’t let your ignorance silence my pain."

"It doesn't matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields. They will always hate me in this world."

"Reality and logic don’t matter to her. She needs this so badly, failure isn’t even in the realm of possibilities."

"I’ve been a sheep. A sheep when my kingdom needed me to act like a king."

"I don't know what shocks me more--- the power in my voice or the words themselves"

"Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw the maji of Ibadan in chains. The gods died with our magic."

"(Chapter Thirty-Four)"

"No matter how much I crave peace, the gods have other plans."

"Power is not the answer. It will only intensify the fight."

"“Everyone else feels like being caught in the rain. You’re the whole tsunami."

"(Chapter One)"

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Acts of love. Be it familial, friendly or romantic. A beautifully described, tender act of love destroys me…I’ve always loved sweeping romances and magical fantasies. I’ve loved headstrong, determined female protagonists and epic battles. I still like to read the same things. I think the difference now is that I get to read all the things I like with characters who look like me. My childhood stories didn’t give me that. Even in the stories I wrote myself, I was only writing white characters and biracial characters. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that erasure was painful and damaging to my sense of self. So getting to create and read stories that fight that erasure and build on my sense of self is the only significant change in my reading tastes."

"You have your duty and your heart. To chose one means the other must suffer."

"I begin to realise how far others will go to keep us down."

"Love is too strong, too intense, for what I feel. For what I am allowed to feel."

"I saw the opportunity to show the beauty in the culture and show that these words sound magical. We’re so used to using Latin, but if J.K. Rowling saw magic in that, you can see magic in your own culture. And if you can see it, you can help other people to see it."

"The thing is that underneath we are all humans…Everyone has people they love and people they want to protect, everyone has things they are afraid of or that cause them pain."

"…I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) For novelists, I’m a forever-fan of Sabaa Tahir. Her debut fantasy — “An Ember in the Ashes” — was the epic tale that inspired me to write “Children of Blood and Bone.” It moved me in ways a story hadn’t moved me before and gave me a chance to imagine a fantasy world with characters I’d never gotten to see before. For journalists, Shaun King. The work Shaun does for the black community is incredible. I respect his strength, tenacity and passion, and I admire him deeply for the commitment to getting our stories out."

"When I read, I like to go somewhere else in my mind with stories that touch our real world without taking place in it."

"(Chapter Forty-Five)"

"People say you’ve got to write honestly and that sounds great but also, what does that mean? I think part of that is knowing there are some things black people go through that are universal and those things are how the world shapes you…if you’re in a racist encounter, they’re not going to say, “Oh, you’re Jamaican, oh, you’re Nigerian; oh, you’re full African American; your ancestors were brought here on slave ships.” That’s not what other people see. In the outside world, we have a kind of universal experience but it also changes depending on whether you’ve grown up in predominantly white spaces or predominantly black spaces…"

"(What makes for a good fantasy novel?) I think the most magical fantasies will always be the ones with a world you want to live in forever…I think great worlds are important because they allow readers to play in that world with their imagination long after the book is done, but a great world isn’t complete without a great protagonist."

"Those are Father’s words, Inan. His decisions. Not yours. We are our own people. We make our own choices.”"

"I kept on ignoring him. The dead are only ghosts, after all."

"Here in the South, class-action lawyers are what we have instead of unions. Legally speaking, we prefer shoot-outs to sit-ins."

"Ghosts don’t do things to you. Ghosts make you do unspeakable things to yourself."

"I thought about how the sound of burning and the sound of running water are almost the same."

"There are so many different ways lives work out, so many stories, and every one of them is precious: full of joy and heartbreak, and a fair amount of situation comedy. Every life is a movie that starts in color. They just all end in black and white."

"In short, I was behaving well...but at another level I was just Going Through The Motions. One of the things about being a grown-up is learning how to do that, learning how to act right even when you feel wrong."

"Houston is basically a concrete saucepan full of swamp water. The sun heats it up to a slow boil in May and keeps it simmering through to the end of October."

"The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down. Not for anyone, not even family. The secret is to pretend you can’t hear the voices of the people who have fallen down there in the dark."

"There’s a fine line between Houston and farce."

"Cut forward to the present, BOOM! imprint Archaia receives the license to explore the unproduced screenplay in the comics medium and asks me to be involved -- that last point entirely because they knew I'd pursue them like a hound from hell if they didn't let me. Or, worse, I'd totally sulk."

"[F]or me the brilliance of the first film — the underlying reason that I hold it so highly — can be boiled down to two words: childlike wonder. Literally every character in that movie is a version of a child we'd all recognize. From the laid-back mystics — remember that high-functioning kid in every classroom who just stares dreamily out the window all day? — to the petulant and venal bullies of the villainous Skeksis. They're all cast as utterly original monsters, but they're very recognizable tropes once you know what you're looking for. This was a movie which introduced a whole new world, after all -- not just some lazy Tolkien-esque fantasy rip-off, but a teeming, exotic, alien reality full of impossible life and delightfully weird wonders. The little piece of genius which underlies the movie is that the central characters are experiencing all this craziness for the first time, just like we the viewers."

"The original movie landed in 1982 and caused an immediate stir, being the first live-action flick which featured literally no human characters. I'm not sure the audiences of the day quite knew what to make of it. Critics expected it to fit tidily into the continuum of knowingly comedic Muppetry which had made the Henson name, and couldn't wrap their heads around this slice of totally earnest, unironic adventure which set its sights on nothing less than pure wonder. Is it sci-fi? Fantasy? A kids' flick?"

"I've adhered to the story in the screenplay pretty closely but the one thing I've insisted upon is that we should experience it all through the eyes of a newcomer. The accidental upshot of that is that a reader of the new comic doesn’t even need to have seen the movie (although of course they should!), since our protagonist is encountering this world and its history for the first time, too."

"[T]he Skeksis will always be horribly memorable. I'm pretty sure the scene where the Chamberlain is attacked and defrocked by his sneering brothers gave me nightmares as a youngster."

"It would've been too easy to go looking for an artist from the same hazy 'beautifully messy' school of creation as Brian Froud, whose aesthetic is most closely linked to the Henson movies. But there's literally nobody who can do that stuff as well, so why bother? It makes far more sense to lean the other way and present this world in a very clean and bold aesthetic."

"I think it spoke to me so strongly when I first saw it because it set itself a very precise challenge: presenting a totally new world, which nonetheless has the capacity to make the viewer relate and respond to its characters' interactions. That sounds very simple, but as a storyteller I can reliably report that it's unutterably sophisticated."

"“Flags are symbols. Words are symbols. Steeples are symbols. Red lights in front of cathouses are symbols. The world don’t know it, but the world lives by symbols, some good, some as bad as flags.”"