Quotes by Guy Gavriel Kay

About Guy Gavriel Kay:

Guy Gavriel Kay is a Canadian writer of fantasy fiction. Many of his novels are set in fictional realms that resemble real places during real historical periods, such as Constantinople during the reign of Justinian I or Spain during the time of El Cid. Those works are published and marketed as historical fantasy, although Kay has expressed a preference to avoid genre categorization.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I have been made to realize tonight that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause.

Guy Gavriel Kay

She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.

Guy Gavriel Kay

When I'm all grown up, come what may, I'll build a boat to carry me away

Guy Gavriel Kay

A hand fought best when it made a fist.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It ...

Guy Gavriel Kay

I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.

Guy Gavriel Kay

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peop...

Guy Gavriel Kay

Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound str...

Guy Gavriel Kay

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.

Guy Gavriel Kay

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I never answer, because I can't, which is my favorite among my own books.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Everything you have ever heard about the strangeness of Hollywood is true!

Guy Gavriel Kay

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Author Bio

  • NameGuy Gavriel Kay
  • DescriptionCanadian author of fantasy fiction
  • BornNovember 7, 1954
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionLawyer; Author
  • WorksThe Summer Tree; Tigana
  • AwardsMember Of The Order Of Canada