Teresa Nielsen Hayden Quotations

I have to go make books. Sorry about that.

If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right.

Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.

Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always.

Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.

Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.

The advent of the internet has made so many things possible. Self- published recreational journalism has always been around; but back when you had to at least learn to run a mimeograph, and you had to pay postage to distribute your deathless prose, people who didn't actually have much to say for themselves found other hobbies

I believe God put that itchy spot on our backs just exactly where we can't reach it in order to encourage us be nice to each other.

Didn't need the user icon to know you're white and male.

If this power could be used for good, it wouldn't be this power.

If there is no willingness to use force to defend civil society, it's civil society that goes away, not force.

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.