Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

My portal to another world was fiction.

What year is it in your imagination?

The more kind of head trippy sci-fi. I always like that. I was a big 'Twilight Zone' freak.

The minute I forget to balance reality with the fantasy, I'm going back to Virginia.

I love imagining being someone else in another time.

The idea of future or past, either way, is a core part of entertainment. It's something we've always loved as humans. Its part of our psyche, I think.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn't for most people, but I am not interested. There's too much of it about.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that's the case with a lot of kids. The whole idea of escapism really resonates with a lot of kids.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

Books are time machines, transporting us out of our own lives into other times and other places.

I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read 'The Hobbit' and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.

I grew up reading science fiction.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I must have seen the 'Twlight Zone' movie, like, a thousand times.

I started re-reading 'Harry Potter' just to throw myself back into my childhood. I forgot how awesome the books are.

I grew up raiding my brother's comic book stash. I tried to lose myself in fiction.

I think when, like, things like 'The Wizard' and even like 'Tron,' when it first came out, I was a teenager, and, man, I really wanted to kind of just kind of disappear into it.

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.

I don't think it necessarily makes me want to go back to my 20s, but what I love about playing any type of character is the escapism.

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.

Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"