American author (1979- )
If you want to know about the beginning of things, you have to talk to the dead.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
I have no interest in writing a book about my abusive childhood or my awful marriage, stripped of the folklore and myth through which I saw those things even while they were happening. For me, those images are part of what happened, and part of what makes personal experience into stories that can touch others. It's more interesting to walk between the real world and the constructed world--and more, I don't really think there's much of a difference. Fiction is always fiction. It might as well have manticores in it as divorces.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Rain Taxi, November 21, 2013