To me, intolerance leads down a dreadful path that the world sometimes seems to be going to.

You do not see fairies through the eyes, you see them through the heart and that took me a long time to learn because I was always trying to see them through my eyes.

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.

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

Part of what I feel is that the so-called bad fairies are really only there to get you to pay some attention. They trick you up until you're lying flat on your back and you literally have another point of view. They're about loosening up being rigid. They trip you over to break the barrier between you and the world. So their so-called "badness" actually can be quite instrumental in helping you with things.

In the 20th century, artists did a great disservice to fairies. They painted fairies in a way that was shallow and trite. So when people see my stuff, they suddenly realize the depth of fairies.

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.