Quotes About Fantasy

All of the problems we're facing with debt are manmade problems. We created them. It's called fantasy economics. Fantasy economics only works in a fantasy world. It doesn't work in reality.

The camera is your way to see what you want to see - it's an extension of the director's fantasy. I'm executing my personal fantasy, whether it's a fantasy of pleasure or of pain and fear.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

In a closed urban fantasy, the magical world is secret and no one knows about it. In an open urban fantasy, everyone knows about it. So with a closed fantasy, you have to figure out how the world keeps itself secret, and with an open one, you have to figure out how knowledge of magic has altered the world we know.

I don't really deal with the attention I receive to be honest. I build up a fantasy world around me that I inhabit. I cherry pick elements of literature, music, film, history and art, then weave them together to construct a fantasy reality to live in. It doesn't always work out though, I got evicted from my own fantasy once, which was quite embarrassing.

Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes.

An awful lot of fantasy, and even some great fantasy, falls into the mistake of assuming that a good man will be a good king, that all that is necessary is to be a decent human being and when you're king everything will go swimmingly.

Drama is my sweet spot, but the thing about being an actor is that you want to do a variety of things. I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.

Back 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.

I 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.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

I really wanted Rachel [from the Girl on The Train] to be purely fixated on fantasy and on her ex-husband.I didn't want her to be embarking on romance, touching people; I wanted her purely in the realm of fantasy and frustration and dreaming and sadness.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

When you shoot a film, when it was film, there used to be rushes and normally a director would look at them the next day. All directors look at the rushes, except for Fellini. I asked him why he didn't and said, "Because it interrupts my fantasy." What he was trying to say was that he had a three-dimensional, vibrant, living, volatile fantasy going on in his head, and when he looked at rushes, they were two-dimensional and they killed it.

I've always really loved big worlds and the kind of worldbuilding where you can open a portal into a new realm that feels full and complete. At the same time, I also really love history. So the combination of big worlds and history draws me directly into fantasy. Well, it should turn me towards historical fiction but I'm such a perfectionist about research that I'm not sure I could ever write a book in that genre properly. In fantasy, you have to have the same level of precision, but it's not as research-based. Plus, I get to write my little info sheets and draw my maps.

It's hard if you start believing that you should be really that perfect fantasy ideal, that people start believing because of all of the retouching. You can delve into that fantasy world and play with it, but when you walk away, that's not you.

Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.

Fantasy fans are incredibly loyal and passionate. Other people don't want to be seen as passionate about things, they want to be cool and laconic. The great thing about fantasy fans is they'll really get behind a show.

Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do.

We have more brilliant fantasy novels than brilliant fantasy movies. Movies and TV are done by committee. But with a novel, it's really just one person running the show. That allows for a clarity and unity of vision that's pretty unique, artistically.

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

I love The West Wing for many reasons. The show has been a fantasy. But we have offered a parallel universe to reality.

In his fantasy, he kissed his best friend again, pulled back, and… “I love you,” he said into the spray of the shower. “I… love you.” As he closed his eyes against the pain, it was hard to know how much of what ran down his cheeks was water, and how much was something else.

Last year in Germany at a town hall in Leipzig there was a game music concert played by the orchestra and some of the Final Fantasy scores were played. This year there is another concert scheduled in the same location, for game music.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

Initially it was a fascination for Tolkienesque Fantasy, and role-playing games, with time I realized that it was the mythological elements that fascinated me the most, so I moved more and more in that direction.

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .

Is this the life you really want? Or is it just the fantasy of it?

I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.

The thing to me that's fun is trying to make the characters seem believable, or realistic. And it's especially challenging when you're doing fantasy stories, when you're doing superhero types of things.

In nightlife you can do anything you want, because that is the fantasy life, the opposite of your daily life. Everything - except violence - is tolerated. And that is why it is so surrealistic in a way.

Like I said, when all of that goes away and you just completely lose yourself in the fantasy of it, then that's usually when I walk out of the theatre or turn off the television and just go: "That was brilliant!"

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Let me get this thing straight, Inigo--we had SCRAPS for dinner? I'M in YOUR fantasy and the best you can come up with is SCRAPS?" She turned toward the door then. "You have no chance of winning my heart.

This is my ultimate fantasy: watching QVC with a credit card while making love and eating at the same time.

I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.

In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide - a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world.

If readers like The Thorn and the Blossom, which I would call literary fantasy, I think they would like books such as Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love, Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen.

As a child, my whole life was books. They were my fantasy. That's where I could go. That was a lot of times [what] saved me.

I think literature is somehow both a fantasy and a reality we should all get back to.

I am definitely interested in soundtracks that one might associate with fantasy or sci-fi - they tend to be rich with musical ideas.

Jack Force was more than she had ever dared wish for, and he was better than a dream or a fantasy because he was real. He was far from perfect, moody and distant at times, and burdened with sharp temper and an impulsiveness that was part of his dark nature. But she felt more love for him than she thought possible. He wasn't perfect, but he was perfect for her. (Schuyler Van Alen)

The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that, “does right” and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing their best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.

And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.