Robin Hobb

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.

Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves.

Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.

Dragons, to my way of thinking, are just another 'race' of sapient characters. We see lots of elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, giants and, of course, dragons.

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn't work that way.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.