Tom Shippey Quotations

If we're looking back in 1,000 years time, his work will be instantly recognizable as 20th century, ... entirely characteristic of that period, and articulating the concerns of the century.

My colleagues in the literary department say it's all very escapist stuff. I think, 'No, no, no.' It's actually all about what happened in the 20th century. The 20th century has basically been industrialized warfare,

Tolkien reintroduced the world of fairy tale to a new audience. It was a very traditional image of fairy tale -- elves, dwarves, trolls, dragons, wizards. Those have all come out of fairy tales. But Tolkien put the whole thing on the map, ... A lot of that stuff is traditional material that he has codified and rationalized in a kind of 20th-century way.

I reckon it would take you 40 hours to read the first book out loud. Cutting that to three hours -- well, what can you do? The answer is, abridge, ... If you know the story, you can see them skipping.

Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.

Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.