Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
I’m consistently asked how I keep a foot in two contrasting worlds – one in the entertainment industry, predicated on wealth and indulgence, and the other in humanitarian work. To me, it’s less of a question of how can you do this, and more a question of how can you not?
Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
I’ve always wanted to keep my foot in film as well as theatre and be working in both worlds.
Pixar films are not realistic. They are believable for the worlds we are creating.
Fictional realms are usually terrible places to vacation, as they tend to be full of monsters and conflicts – Narnia and Middle-earth would both be good places to get killed – but I wouldn’t mind visiting the worlds of Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture.’ You’d just have a hard time getting me to leave.
Children’s books deal in idealized worlds, so they’re a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.
I was a police reporter, so I got into the worlds that I write about, and I think many of the details in my books come from those days.
I’ve always been curious about the other worlds we can shift into in our imaginations.
The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
People don’t listen to one radio station. On iTunes you can mix different worlds and bring country and pop and folk and live music together with a mass audience. I could have sung ‘Easy’ in a country way but I just sang it how I sing. I think it’s a really nice blend.
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I’m most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
When I was small, I was always thinking about different worlds in my head.
But to me, ‘Worlds’ is meant as kind of an appreciation of fiction and stories and escapism and fantasy.
Sadly, there are many children who have not yet been given the chance to ‘discover the magic of reading, or set foot in the worlds you can discover on bookshelves.
Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it’s discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I’m at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy – you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
I was raised in an Indian household – singing classical music and eating south Indian food. But the second I went to school, it was a different world. I’d be listening to Destiny’s Child, Usher and the Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t until college that I really found the balance between the two worlds.
This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.
The grand sweep of constitutional or political history is important, but a detailed history of daily life also gives you a wonderful insight into the strange mental worlds of people in the past.
People talk a lot about Pixar going off the rails. A lot of people are saying they aren’t happy that we are making sequels. But for every one of those people, there is one that is happy because they fell in love with the worlds we created. We hope we’ve proved that a sequel can be every bit as enjoyable as the original.
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.
There may be little practical difference between a Ford Mondeo and a BMW three series, but in terms of perceptions of who you are and what you are, then they are worlds apart.
There was a gap in minority heroes in animation, books, and storytelling for me as a kid, and being a father now, I felt the responsibility I had to the next generation to create stories that allow us to wish and dream and build worlds that inspire young people who haven’t traditionally had these heroes to look up to.
I have jeggings to wear and worlds to conquer.
The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.
This business is crazy-pants. We flit in and out of these fantasy worlds and these intense periods of work and camaraderie, and then it goes away, and you do it all over again.
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.
It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.
The only way I can make sense of my music is to compartmentalize it as opposed to having one band that I have to throw everything into. For me, it’s just more fun and more challenging to create little worlds where a song or a piece can make sense.
The Worlds was great, Masters was great, but that was sort of mission accomplished with the Triple Crown.
Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.
I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios.
The worlds of art and fashion have always been very intertwined at Dior. Francois-Xavier Lalanne and his wife, Claude, for instance, did windows for Monsieur Dior. Dior himself was a gallerist before becoming the revolutionary fashion designer we all know.
The capacities by which we can gain insights into higher worlds lie dormant within each one of us.
Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.
If few worlds have microbial life, it dramatically reduces the chances that more complex organisms exist.
I love Japan. I love the collision of the modern and ancient worlds coming together in that place. It’s so high-tech and cool.
The strength people need to proceed along the path of human development can come only from the spiritual worlds.
I think a lot of Africans in my generation, and especially those of us who have spent time overseas before coming back, are quite comfortable moving between the two worlds, though always with a lens of, ‘What can we do to help our countries or regions?’
I started reading and fell in love with the worlds and characters Lev Grossman created. I’m taken with his exploration of an idealized childhood fantasy through the lens of adulthood, or coming into adulthood.
They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds.
What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.
I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.
Through books and photographs, I saw a world that was not my own – and I realized that there was another world. That’s why I’m concerned about education, because it helps our children see other worlds.
I felt it was a privilege that I came from such a rich background. I had the best of both worlds. My mother was a Shia Muslim, while my father was a janoi-clad man. He never pretended to be secular.
One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
Sanders’ coalition of millions of spoiled, narcissistic rich kids and big-government addicts is worlds apart from the Trump coalition, and the two have very little in common.
I don’t separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they’re all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
I’ve always been interested in invisible worlds, and I like to visit digital worlds, you know, any world that’s imposed on us.
Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own.
While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.
I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.
The beauty of Rome is that you can wander into a pizzeria just about anywhere and get a real Italian pizza that’s thankfully worlds away from the Super Supreme I used to order at Pizza Hut as a kid.
