Lewis Carroll Quotes

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

I mean, it's fine when you're a kid and someone runs into the playground and goes, 'I've got this great game of pretend,' and you play... As an actor, getting to play, getting to use your imagination and be childish - it is weird but it's wonderful.

I was always dressing up as a kid in the backyard, building some sort of fort and having battles against imaginary enemies. It's often that same feeling when you're pretending for a living, but it's with bigger toys.

I liked to play dress-up.

We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.

I have a split - of my real home-life side that's real-life, and then the creative side that is not necessarily real-life, but it intersects my real-life so much.

As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.

When I watch my sons play, I think, God, acting's the most natural thing in the world. They take the 'Star Wars' characters and say, 'Let's pretend that I'm Hans and you're Luke and that we're on this planet,' etc.

Ever since I was a little girl, I loved dressing up.

When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother - a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.'

I was an imaginative kid. My sister needed entertaining, whereas I was the one under the table playing with a bit of fluff on the carpet. I was the sort of child who would spend time rolling up balls of all different kinds of fluff and that would be my little family.

Before I even started to school, I sometimes would hide behind the radio, which would be sitting on a table, and pretend that I was on the air and try to fool people who came by to listen.

One of my favourite games as a child was to dress up and improvise. Acting seemed obvious.

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.

I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Play and transformation were a bit part of my childhood - using whatever materials were at our disposal, my brothers and I would constantly build and create fantasy worlds.

There was a big age difference between me and my brothers - about 10 years - so I was an only child for a long time. I used to hang out a lot on my own. I played a lot of weird games with a lot of imaginary people. I guess it's kind of roleplaying.

I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

I didn't have an imaginary childhood friend, but I did one day imagine somehow tiny green men, and they were only tiny and green because my brother had a ton of toy soldier toys that came on a skateboard plank type of thing, and I just envisioned in this car driving to church with my mom, they were there.

As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.