Robin Hobb Quotations

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

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

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.

I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.

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

I think it was always okay to be a geek.

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 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.

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.

Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.

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.

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.

Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.'

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.

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.

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.

At what point is a person old enough to say, 'I own my body, and I get to do what I want with it'?

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

I know some people see it as this success when the book is finally made into a movie - that marks its success. I don't see it that way.

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.

Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.

THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world.

Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.

Start writing sooner. Don't wait for permission. Don't hesitate.

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated.

You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.

Wolves have no kings.

When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.

I am the King's Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait.

Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.

I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don't. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I've never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.

As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.

Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties.

I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.

Some people say 'I want to be a writer,' and some people say, 'I want to write.'

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.

Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them.

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.

Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.

Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. - Shaman's Crossing by Robin Hobb

No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.

Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.

Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right. ~Amber

The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.

I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.

if love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love.

No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves. Fitz in Assassin's Quest

How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool? Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice

Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change. The Fool in Fool's Fate

I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

Useless to worry until we find outselves blocked. ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.

Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won't. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can't eat meat until you've killed it.

Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.

But a living is not a life.

Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.

Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.

Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Royal Assassin

One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.

One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence the the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day. -Fitz Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too. -Chade When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead. -Burrich We left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life. -Fitz

A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

My blood will only buy you that fool's regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.

Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.

If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.

The fight isn't over until you win.

King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.

It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you." -FitzChivalry Farseer

Fitz fixes fyces fitz.Fatsafices.

The biggest doubts come in the five minutes after I hit send.

Cats talk to whomever they please.

Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.

the greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of.

What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.

You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick

When both my editors say 'This is really bad, you need to change this,' I ignore that at my peril.

Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.

When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all. ~ The Fool to Fritz in Assassin's Apprentice

learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn't wrong. Or right. It's just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That's all.

In that last dance of chances I shall partner you no more. I shall watch another turn you As you move across the floor. In that last dance of chances When I bid your life goodbye I will hope she treats you kindly. I will hope you learn to fly. In that last dance of chances When I know you'll not be mine I will let you go with longing And the hope that you'll be fine. In that last dance of chances We shall know each other's minds. We shall part with our regrets When the tie no longer binds.

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.

I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.

Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.

You are confusing plumbing and love again.

I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down at them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.

Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.

Not all men are destined for greatness," I reminded him. "Are you sure, Fitz? Are you sure? What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I changed the world today?

One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.

I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.

...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.