Elizabeth Hand
But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.Collection: Running
You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.Collection: Character
I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing. I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.Collection: Jobs
There is a love of wood, as of other things that do not answer to our touch.Collection: Answers
I wanted to have very strong female characters. I just thought it was always the way the world should be.Collection: Strong
Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.Collection: Giving Up
Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of.Collection: Childhood
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.Collection: Book
It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared.Collection: Ideas
The irruption of the supernatural into our world is a much more enticing notion to explore than the same thing happening in some past time, or in a wholly imaginary world.Collection: Past