Tatyana Tolstaya Quotes

And I guess I'm a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to play those things in both 'True Blood' and in 'American Horror Story.'

I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

I loved 'Pan's Labyrinth.' It transported me into another world. I like fantasy worlds; I love 'Lord of the Rings' as well, for that reason, because you really get to get out of reality and go somewhere else.

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.

The beauty of reading is that it lets you travel in a way you could never know.

Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.

When I was little, I loved books that gave me lots of detail so that I felt like I could be transported to this other place, or, in the case of an illustration, I felt like I could walk into the page.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

I guess...on one hand, I spent way too much time watching science fiction and reading science fiction when I was growing up. But a part of it is I also never felt much of a connection to the world in which I lived while I was growing up, and so, oddly enough, I think I felt a lot more connected to the worlds that I read about in science fiction.

Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

I really feel that's part of why audiences go to movies now is to take you to a world you have no access to, whether it's the world of Avengers or Middle-earth or bars in Boston you would be afraid to go into. You see characters there - they aren't hobbits but they're close.

But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.

I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. I grew up in the projects. I never went anywhere. But I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.