Jonathan Galassi Quotes

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

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.

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

There is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can't be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can't write

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.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

Stories aren't the beauty of what did happen. They're the beauty of what could happen.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

I just enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed watching films and reading and becoming someone else. I spent a lot of time on my own when I was younger; I enjoyed my own company and still do, so it was a source of escapism.

My photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn't exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living.

I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

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

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.