Popular quotes about Fantasy! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it.
Terry PratchettFantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.
Terry PratchettI'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
Terry PratchettBack in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We'd consume them like M&M's, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there's almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens.
Meg CabotI don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.
Nate SilverThere is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can't be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can't write
Stevie NicksWhat is appealing is the idea of attaining the unattainable and learning from it. Once you obtain a fantasy it becomes a reality, and that reality is not as exciting as your fantasy. Through the fantasies you learn to appreciate your own realities.
Ricardo MontalbanI believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
Maurice SendakAn element of fantasy is needed when falling in love and I was unable to find the fantasy element with any of the male gender
Novala TakemotoPlastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.
Kate WinsletI do know whatโs been useless to me is the online fantasy name generators. Iโve tried those a few times, and they say, โJust hit this button and weโll generate 50 fantasy names,โ and they all turn out to be โGrisknuckleโ.
George R. R. MartinYou'll never be fully engaged in where you are or where you're going by settling for normal. Here's a fact: No one who was normal ever made history. Drop that fantasy like a hot rock!
James Arthur RayFantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth BowenI enjoy acting when you really hit it right. And I guess I've always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife.
Marilyn MonroePersonally, I think the 'Christian family' should be called a Christian fantasy.
Ruth Hurmence GreenWe women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.
Carolyn HeilbrunLike this. The wristbands you get at nightclubs next to all the bracelets? It's always the details that give me the ideas. It's fun to play with fashion because it is a fantasy. Each morning you dress to become a different woman. Fashion helps.
Carine RoitfeldWell, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it โ I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.
Terry GilliamA man's primary fantasy is access to a variety of attractive women without the fear of rejection.
Warren FarrellMy writerly aspirations are pretty simple: to provide as many readers as possible with the same sort of wonderful immersion that I myself get from fantasy novels - and to make enough money to help feed my kids while doing so.
Saladin AhmedChess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?
Garry Kasparov'Fantasy' is one of the fewer tracks where it's more literal than most of our things, but at the same time it's totally open-ended. Clearly it's a song about things not really appearing as you want them to, or things either getting what you want and not being satisfied with it because it wasn't how you hoped it would be, or thinking you want something and not getting it and the realisation of that.
Lizzy PlapingerImagination doesnโt just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I donโt, and never would, write Real Books.
Diana Wynne JonesMy advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.
Juliet MarillierThe only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.
Amos OzMetal guys are huge nerds. A good percentage of them are either horror or sci-fi or comic book or fantasy nerds.
Scott IanI am in communication with almost everybody I've done a story about. I have a fantasy that if I ever strike it rich, I'll have a big party and fly all of these people there, and they'll be roaming around the party - Billy Mitchell, Master Legend, Santa Tim, Rio DiAngelo, Mr. Romance circa 2007, and so on.
Joshuah BearmanHow dare the embodiment of her worst nightmare come packaged as her hottest fantasy?
Karen Marie MoningMore than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
Lev Grossman...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.
Orson Scott CardThe buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.
Christopher AlexanderI hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.
Piers AnthonyThe Magicians brilliantly explores the hidden underbelly of fantasy and easy magic, taking whatโs simple on the surface and turning it over to show us the complicated writhing mess beneath. Itโs like seeing the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter through a 3-D magnifying glass.
Naomi NovikThe neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.
Mignon McLaughlinThere is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre youโre involved in, whether itโs a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.
Gary GygaxI just think my family is so normal, but no one wants to accept that. I find my family to be normal because there's an understanding of what every job entails. And it is a job. It's not this fantasy that Hollywood and movies are all glitter and stardust.
Elizabeth OlsenI think what I'm doing is quintessentially American because I'm not American - even though I am on the verge of getting my American passport next week - I have a fantasy of what is American. Big spaces, Marlon Brando, James Dean, easy living.
Italo ZucchelliI do not think we will see a stateless society in my lifetime. But I am sure we will not see a state that conforms to the minarchists' ideals. The closer we get, the better, but I see no reason not to aspire for the best government as Thoreau imagined it: none at all. It's certainly more consistently idealistic than what the minarchists imagine, and yet it's at least possible, whereas the existence of a lasting, minimal state is a hopeless fantasy.
Anthony GregoryI think literature is somehow both a fantasy and a reality we should all get back to.
Shane Warren JonesWit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelFantasy is, I believe, the great nourisher of imagination. To paraphrase Einstein on how to develop intelligence in young people: Read fairy tales. Then read more fairy tales.
Lloyd Alexander