Val McDermid Quotes

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.

I just went and got an agent because I thought I can create my own world - you can't right your own life, but you can escape to a world where you can have control.

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

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

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.

My portal to another world was fiction.

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

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.

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.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

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

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I feel like we've found an interesting little corner of the sandbox here as far as the way we're telling sci-fi stories. I don't think it's limited to sci-fi - I think anything fantastic can co-exist with people you and I know, and not these hyper-real movie people.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

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.

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.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

I like fantasy.

A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs.

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.

I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi.