It is plain enough that fairy-stories (in the wider or narrower sense) are very ancient indeed. Related things appear in very early records; and they are found universally, wherever there is language. […] The history of fairy-stories is probably more complex than the physical history of the human race, and as complex as the history of human language. All three things: independent invention, inheritance, and diffusion, have evidently played their part in producing the intricate web of Story.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories [x]
Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself.
— Ursula K. le Guin interview (2016) [x]
I spent years struggling to convince myself that folk tales and the fantastic could also be literary. When we relegate certain types of work into literary or non-literary, we undermine the purpose of fiction: to reflect our humanity and our reality, both of which are strange and fantastic in their purest forms. […] The strange and fabulous exists.
— Hannah Gilham, Discovering the Fabulists [x]
Fantasy was without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flowed. […] The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now — that’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. The Bahaghvad Gita. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is […] a work of fantasy.
— Terry Pratchett interview (1995) [x]
