It was ironic that there I was finally painting the pictures I'd always wanted to paint and feeling very much at home in the countryside, and I ended up working in New York City, which is definitely the archetypal city.

Fairies are becoming much more popular. I see fairyland as this big sea, and the tide is sometimes out.

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.

I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.

Nobody wanted to publish a book about fairies; they said people wouldn't be interested. Luckily, I discovered Lady Cottington and her pressed fairies, which revived a huge amount of interest in fairies, so I could go ahead and do the book I wanted to do.

Once you step onto the fairy path, it's almost like there's no way off. You have to keep going.

Voices in the forest tell of dark and twisted enchantments - as dark and twisted as the roots and grasping branches of the trees themselves. Even the most gnarled tree is eloquent in the telling of its own tale.