Brian Sutton-Smith Quotes

Play is the royal road to childhood happiness and adult brilliance.

That's what's so great about my job. I get paid to do what got me in trouble in grade school space out and play with my imaginary friends. In terms of Isaac, when the time's right.

I make napkins talk in restaurants, socks talk on car journeys. There is an awful lot of puppetry going on in the house.

I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.

Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child.

I think LEGOs are one of the best toys ever developed.

Play is the best natural resource in a creative economy. Kids need more of it. It is the work of childhood. We hope to intrinsically change the opinion that play is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity for kids' lives.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.

Little boys have amazing minds.

Children live in a world filled with possibilities. Their thoughts roam without boundaries, like dreams – full of images, places and actions. Unlike adults, they can’t temper their imaginations with experience. So, when a child plays with a toy or reads a story, it becomes an adventure, a new reality to them.

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.

I think that children are very smart.

I used to have imaginary friends.

I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.

Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn't like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.

Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

The ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it.

Fantasy 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.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It's the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulate s the inquisitive nodes, and there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

The power of imagination created the illusion that my vision went much farther than the naked eye could actually see.