The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Everyone, from the Mother Superior to the priests to my parents--they were so upset and reproachful...I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn't.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.