James Badge Dale Quotes

Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me.

I always thought it would be cool to go to the island of misfit toys.

When I was about 5 I think, I desperately wanted to be a pirate and have the hat and everything.

I mean, every child at one stage dreams of being a prince or a princess.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination.

Without education, you really can't dream as a child.

In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

Children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations. Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up.

Like a heartbeat. Something inside me. Some dream. I think it's being a dreamer as a child. Dreamy kids become actors, don't they?

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling - it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.

All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense...

A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country.

When I was a child I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I have ever dreamed has come true a thousand times.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.