Lloyd Alexander Quotes

For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

What I feel that "Alice in Wonderland" did for me and other people in exploring your dream state, and using fantasy in your dream state to deal with real issues and problems in your life. People like to separate those things but the fact is that they are things that are intertwined.

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

The reason you want to act is to continue to explore every different part of the human psyche.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.

Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one's head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world.

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

Everything I've done has always been my own made up world with its own rules and its own made up stories.

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It's like my friend, almost.

I loved musicals, and I loved Barbra Streisand, and I loved Louis Malle. My tastes were very bizarre, but the thing they all had in common is that they took me out of my life and made me feel something.

Art is the skin of the soul.

There's so much power in allegory, to form ideas and learn lessons that you can actually take and apply to real life. I think that's why I originally really loved fantasy and reading.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

Fantasy is usually considered an escape, but it's also a way to deal with weighty real-world issues from a safe distance and in a context where you usually have some kind of power that you don't have in real life.

Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.

I feel like 'Amelie' is very much an extension of me. She's a contemporary woman who sees the world through her imagination.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.