Nora K. Jemisin Quotes

It's hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there's all these 'rules' I'm supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines.

Readers seem to really like the fact that what I'm writing is not traditional fantasy.

If you can imagine something, it will be.

I was raised to be very wary of the police. I was raised to stay away from them unless you absolutely have to. Because they're dangerous.

There's a tendency in American thought – maybe elsewhere, but that's the culture I know best – to default to social Darwinism, even though even Darwin noted that's a misapplication of his ideas.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

I read a lot of history for fun.

It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small – a locked room-style story.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

I think the people who believe that works can and always should be divorced from the context are people who have the privilege to do so.

It takes practice to do anything unique within this field, period, in writing, practice doing anything unique in writing.

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Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

I am always personalizing tees to fit my personality, cutting off rocker shirts, debunking the mold of what traditional 'work wear' means, and always wearing my cause.

Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.

If you break down most rock songs and look at the lyrics on a piece of paper, it's all about melody. It's all about presentation. And a lot of bands are really great, but you can't understand a word of what they say.

I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.

Nora K. Jemisin Quotes

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