Shaun Tan Quotes

What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.

For me, 'Harry Potter' isn't something that changed my life. It's just something I did that was a lot of fun and I got to experience amazing things from. But my actual, personal life is the same. Or at least I like to keep it the same.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.

Movies are different from real life.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

Fantasy was something I'd read as a child. And, in fact, my teachers despaired a little bit because I refused to give up Enid Blyton. Then I walked through the wardrobe with C. S. Lewis, and I don't think I actually have returned fully from the wardrobe. So, fantasy was something that was in my life from quite young.

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life.

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

I'm half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It's best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

I'm not really gangsta. Not at all. I just write about them. It's fun to pretend, at least on paper. But in real life, not so much.

Without its roots in reality, I don't think escapism can survive.

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.

Everything is only a dream.

All life is a dream, and all dreams are dreams.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream.

I wish that we did have a magic wand which we could wave and hey presto! Magic! Unfortunately life is not like that.