Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.
The thing with drama is you're allowed to invent people who are maybe slightly better than real people.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.
I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
I was always into fantasy characters, stories of magic, but after Red Sonja, I became obsessed with the persona, the image, of the warrior woman - the sword-wielding, defiant, fearless woman.
I do like fantasy films.
A library is where you meet fascinating characters you never forget.
I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.
Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.
I love books that create worlds for me that I don't want to leave. I recently lost my entire life to Haruki Murakami - 1Q84. I tell people that book ruined my life in the best possible way. I couldn't think of anything else for weeks after I read it.
It's funny, because I don't have a very addictive personality in any way except for things like stories or books or movies or TV. I just get, like, completely enamored and lost in that world, especially when one really hits the right way. Like, I just can't do anything else.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
