Hans Christian Andersen Quotes

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

The best stories infuse wonder.

I've read up on magic, and I think it sets you free, and it gives you hope. You can explore worlds you didn't know existed. It stretches your imagination, and I like my own imagination to be stretched and also the children I'm telling the story to. It gives you a sense of wonder.

From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way.

I see the world as a magical place. Therefore, it was only natural that magic wafted from my fiction like smoke.

I definitely think my work comes from things that I liked as a kid, and things I still like now. Monsters and magic and museums and movies, a lot of things that start with 'M' for some reason.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.

I had two little daughters - I think they were 7 and 4 at the time - and I said, 'I'll write you a story. What do you want it to be about?' One of them said 'a princess' and the other one said 'a bride.' I said, 'That'll be the title.'

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

Life would be very dreary if there were no magic. If the real world were only that veil of tears, I just don't think could get up in the morning.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.

When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audience listening to my story.