Life & Wisdom Quote by R. A. Salvatore

Salvatore’s casual throat-clearing - “Here’s the thing, for me at least” - is doing more than signaling humility. It’s a bid for credibility from someone who watched fantasy move from niche shelf-space to cultural infrastructure. The repeated, slightly staccato “It wasn’t always so. Not so many years ago, it wasn’t so” mimics an old argument he’s clearly had before: with critics who treated fantasy as escapist juvenilia, with gatekeepers who stocked it sparingly, with readers who had to defend loving it.

The specific intent is historical correction. He’s reminding the audience that “huge genre” status isn’t natural law; it’s a recent, hard-won shift powered by mass-market publishing, franchising, gaming, and the mainstreaming of nerd culture. The phrasing is telling: he doesn’t cite awards or canon formation, he cites scale and variety. That’s the author-of-the-people stance, coming from a writer whose career was built in commercial fantasy rather than literary prestige.

The subtext is both celebratory and defensive. “Tremendous diversity” reads like a claim for legitimacy - not just more dragons, but more entry points, tones, and identities. It also quietly implies a warning against nostalgia: when a genre grows, it stops belonging to any one cohort. Salvatore is marking a generational turning point, staking out fantasy as a living ecosystem, not a walled garden guarded by a single idea of what “counts.”