Imaginary Worlds Quotes

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.

From as far back as I can remember, I always loved the King Arthur stories, fairy tales, mythology - things like that. So it was very natural for me when I came to write the 'Prydain' books to sort of follow that direction.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write.

The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.

I'm concerned about my daughter because she will not believe in Santa Claus. No matter what I say to her, she just doesn't buy it, and she's 2. I refuse to give it up. I say, 'There is a Santa Claus,' and she says, 'Okay, Mommy. In pretend world, right?' She really doesn't believe.

The trend today is vampires, zombies, angels, all the stuff that puts me right to sleep. It's too bad because it's so much less interesting than the diversity of stories you can tell with science.

Because we build the worlds we wouldn't mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there.

I like to be a lot of different things at once and dress different ways and I change my hair all the time, so being an actor lets me live out the fantasy of living out 100,000 different lifetimes in one, without all of the repercussions.

I always say, 'I'm not a pirate, I just play one on TV.'

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.

I've actually written a children's film called 'The Myth,' which you could say is like a big 'Harry Potter'-esque fantasy for kids, and that's a film I would love to see get made. That's a dream project of mine.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

I found 'Bordertown' when I was standing on the border between childhood and my teens, and it carried me past that transition. In the process, it helped to create the next step of its own evolution: the modern urban fantasy owes a lot more to 'Bordertown' than many people will ever know.

People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.

I think human beings will always still really enjoy using our imaginations, and 'Fringe' allows you to do that. It's slightly scary and believable. There just might be an alternate universe. There just might be people on the other side that are like us, living a different life.

Even though I make those movies, I find myself wishing that more of those magic moments could happen in real life.

I don't think there have been many alien movies where the actors have actually seen the aliens.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.