Terri Windling

I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.

We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.

A good novel editor is invisible.

The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.

I was a great fan of Jim Henson.

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.

One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.

Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.

My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.

I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.

I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.