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"Teller of Tales," in The Writer, Vol. 83, No. 5, May 1970

"[I] take conventionally bizarre situations (the car chase, the closed-room murder, the wicked uncle tale) and send real people into them, normal everyday people with normal everyday reactions to violence and fear; people not 'heroic' in the conventional sense, but averagely intelligent men and women who could be shocked or outraged into defending, if necessary with great physical bravery, what they held to be right."

"Wildfire at Midnight was an attempt at something different, the classic closed-room detective story with restricted action, a biggish cast, and a closely circular plot. It taught me technically a great deal, but mainly that the detective story, with its emphasis on plot rather than people, is not for me. What mattered to me was not the mystery, but the choice the heroine faces between personal and larger loyalties."

"The story comes first and is served first...These novels are light, fast-moving stories which are meant to give pleasure, and where the bees in the writer's bonnet are kept buzzing very softly indeed. I am first and foremost a teller of tales, but I am also a serious-minded woman who accepts the responsibilities of her job, and that job, if I am to be true to what is in me, is to say with every voice at my command: 'We must love and imitate the beautiful and the good.'"

 

Literary Guild Review, August 1964

"Perhaps the commonest question of all is: 'I suppose you have to have had all the experiences you describe?' Considering the kind of thing that commonly befalls the heroines of my books, this always startles me a little. What sort of life do people imagine that I lead? The answer to that, of course, is that the word "imagine" means nothing to them, and to them one can hardly start explaining how imagination allows a writer to describe vividly something he has never done or seen. I personally have never been threatened with a gun while driving a racing Mercedes at ninety miles an hour. I have never been hunted with a fish-spear off the coast of Crete. I have never even been alone with a homicidal maniac on a Scottish mountainside. But I think I know how it would feel if I were. The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings."

 

Contemporary Authors, Vol. 1, 1967

She has said that she has a very good visual memory, "almost like a movie camera. When I start describing something in a book, I find myself putting down things I didn't know I'd caught. I'm a sponge, a happy thing for a writer to be."

Ms. Stewart once claimed Thunder on the Right as her least favorite novel. "I detest that book. I'm ashamed of it, and I'd like to see it drowned beyond recovery. It's overwritten. It was actually the second book I wrote, and for some strange reason I went overboard, splurged with adjectives, all colored purple."

 

Raymond H. Thompson's Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature, 1989

"The publishers didn't want me to write The Crystal Cave in the first place, because they were doing so well with the earlier books. Publishers never want you to change; if one horse is doing well, they don't want you to change horses."

"I've written stories since I was three and a half, and I think you're either born with the storyteller's flair or you're not. You can learn much about the craft of writing, but you either have the storyteller's flair or you don't. It's no virtue of mine. It's just there."