Helena Bonham Carter Quotes

That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.

I'm really into the idea of telling stories. Everyone needs stories. Everyone needs to escape every once in a while.

It's not magic that takes us to another world - it's storytelling.

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.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

Neil Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

If a fantasy, if a story can help you feel something, I think that's really cool.

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

I'm going to make my own story for sure.

Write your own stories.

Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.

With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.