quotations about fantasy
Even in a fantasy realm, growing up is accomplished not without cost.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
author's note, The Black Cauldron
"Fantasy" -- certainly when conceived as being in contrast to Realism -- is a most extraordinarily porous term, and has been used to mop up vast deposits of story which this culture or that -- and this era or that -- deems unrealistic.
JOHN CLUTE & JOHN GRANT
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, March 2002
Fantasy, by its power to move us so deeply, to dramatize, even melo-dramatize, morality, can be one of the most effective means of establishing a capacity for adult values.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
"Wishful Thinking -- Or Hopeful Dreaming?"
Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
The Folding Star
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
To make love to a fantasy was the second betrayal of a libertine.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
Fantasy is developed early and remains a part of the individual as long as the portions of the brain responsible for imagination remain intact.
ERIC BEAUREGARD & MELISSA MARTINEAU
The Sexual Murderer
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Fantasy is a world of rhythmical order, a world of connections, of transformations, of metaphorical relationships often between the real and the marvelous.
HAROLD SCHEUB
The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance
The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society’s most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.
PHILIP ROTH
"My Life as a Writer," New York Times, Mar. 2, 2014
I think that the fantasies will always be part of being human, because we're none of us exactly what others want us to be -- and nor are they perfectly what we want, either.... It's when that line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred that there are problems.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
"A talk with author Jeannette Angell: From college lecturer to callgirl and back", Souixland, Oct. 8, 2004
It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.
ROD SERLING
"The Fugitive", The Twilight Zone
From this perspective, fantasy is not liberatory in any concrete or tangible way. Nor is fantasy an opening up to creative possibility. Rather fantasy is a process of censoring-out the intrusions of a communal reality -- a horizon of perspectival engagement that must be both drawn and maintained. The condition of fantasy is that it must always compete for attention with its other possible faces. The constitution of fantasy requires the discarding of other possibilities, no less than the entry (before it) into the fantasy of truth. What is tragic about fantasy is the possibilities it must discard in order to enter into sustainable being. This fantastic surplus might be called the perspective roadkill of contemporary self-projected living.
TED HIEBERT
In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity
I have too many fantasies to be a housewife -- I guess I am a fantasy.
MARILYN MONROE
attributed, Marilyn Monroe
Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it -- I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.
TERRY GILLIAM
"Salman Rushdie talks with Terry Gilliam", The Believer, March 2003
The muse in charge of fantasy wears good, sensible shoes.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
"The Flat-Heeled Muse", Horn Book Magazine, April 1, 1965
Fantasy is not "strange" and "other," yet it is something extraordinary, and it makes sense of the real. It provides the entrance into the worlds of metaphor, into the trope laboratory.
HAROLD SCHEUB
Story
Fantasy is a woman.
MATT MAYEVSKY
Fantasy Is a Woman
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. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, "The Rides of Passage,", Via magazine, July 2005