Only - only that, if you believe the tales, it's in the nature of our people to go to war and to kill, just as it is to sing and play and tell stories. Perhaps they are two halves of the same whole.

There is no truth on this island of yours. Rather, there are as many truths as there are stars in the sky; and every one of them different.

I could not imagine living away from Sevenwaters, away from all that was so much a part of me. Maybe, if you cared enough about someone, you could do it and not feel your spirit torn in two. But the forest keeps her hold on all those who are born there, and they cannot travel far without the yearning in them to return.

I've loved fairytales, folklore and mythology since I was a small child, and I think it was inevitable that they would influence my style and my development of stories.

Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.

Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there's but a hair's breath between them. It's all one in the end.

A wonder tale can be truer than true," I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.