Paul Theroux Quotes

I'm hardly digging trenches for a living. I'm getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character.

I've been to some of the most amazing cities in the world.

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 took my play very seriously, and I got way, way lost in my play world.

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.

A child who has never fantasized about having other parents is seriously lacking in imagination.

Gilligan's Island is wherever you want it to be in your mind.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'

When I was a little girl, I loved theater a lot and I was always playing and making my own worlds.

I sort of make believe. That's why I like acting. You can create or imagine anything.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.

When I was five, I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I love Spain. It's my favorite country that I've been to and I've traveled quite a bit. I've been really fortunate as an adult to have been to a lot of interesting places like Egypt and China.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.

The really best acting is children in a playground or in a backyard. They're just lost in their imagination. The backyard isn't a pirate ship or a jungle, in the same way that the soundstage isn't Shambala.

I have a lot of fantasy.

It's my job, to create a fantasy.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.

The thing with drama is you're allowed to invent people who are maybe slightly better than real people.

It's fun to pretend you're good at something you know you wouldn't be good at in real life.

Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.

A lot of people say video games can be stifling. Older people say, 'We had to go outside, and we had to make up stories!' For me, video games broadened my horizons. Playing 'Golden Axe,' I was those characters. I imagined myself being in that world, so honestly, it was a really good thing.