With fantasy, one often has to think of a well-loved series before narrowing the selection to a favourite book. So it is with Zelazny. I’ve read his ‘Princes in Amber’ books so often, I know them almost verbatim, so much so that I am now trying to forget them so I can return to them with renewed pleasure.
Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren’t about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.
Growing up, I had the weird fantasy list: I wanted to be Alice Cooper, Steven Spielberg, and Stan Lee. You have to have almost psychotic drive, because you’re going to have years of failure.
There’s nothing more political than fantasy.
I keep threatening to write a non-fantasy book, and they keep offering me the kind of money I can’t refuse to write a fantasy. That’s a good thing. I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay for my Chargers season tickets.
I had always thought my fantasy career would be making indie films and doing my own thing. But then ‘Superbad’ came along, and it totally changed everything. It was so hilarious and smart and extreme; you could probably do a psychoanalysis term paper on the male sexual psyche going on there.
I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.
‘Game of Thrones’ has multiple story lines, multiple countries, and it’s complete fantasy.
American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations – the fantasy of freedom and resolve – and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women’s lives.
I don’t want to live in a fantasy world.
The idea that somebody is going to come in and make your debt go away and all be well for the future is really a fantasy.
What started it all was the Kanye album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.’ We started listening to that and just fell in love with it, fell in love with his production style.
In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can’t happen. They have to know it’s a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it’s real. Every detail has to be real or they won’t buy it.
I think I’ll give it up, the fantasy is over, I wanted to play Spiderman, Peter Parker.
Yeah, and I went straight into a fantasy world. Just stepped straight into the abyss. You know, I was gone and kids used to walk past my front room, cause I lived on the green.
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
Fantasy fans are incredibly loyal and passionate. Other people don’t want to be seen as passionate about things, they want to be cool and laconic. The great thing about fantasy fans is they’ll really get behind a show.
Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story’s characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That’s why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.
The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.
Fantasy love is much better than reality love.
We all get stuck. We all lose ourselves a little bit in a fantasy or in our jobs and forget how we feel about other things. It’s really important to check yourself, to spend some time alone.
I’ve read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.
I like working closely with artists. I think that’s very important in fantasy and science fiction – the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.
Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn’t start with Mount Everest. So if you’re starting fantasy, don’t start with a nine-book series.
My biggest fantasy love affair was with Dustin Hoffman. It’s so bizarre. Also Anthony Hopkins.
I’ve had a love affair with the desert ever since I can remember. No matter what I wrote – contemporary romance, spy thriller, high fantasy – it was going to have a desert in it.
Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.
I don’t really like politics that much. And I like the order and simplicity of sports. They have an ending. You can argue with your friends about it, but in the end you still like sports. I almost love the fantasy world of sports more than the real world.
Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
When you talk about the Final Fantasy series, the series started selling better after 7, and that was the base idea for the center of the set list for the LA concert.
I’ve always been much more comfortable with drawing fantasy stuff.
It didn’t matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we’d found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.
People – not just in their teenage years – hold on to this fantasy of love when they’re not ready to have a real relationship.
Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n’ roll.
After I’d been in college for a couple years I’d read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn’t seem to make the effort.
It’s true – women want the fantasy. So give them romance – but without the desperation, wondering, and waiting you see in the movies.
‘Castle’ is a guy living in a fantasy world. He’s in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.
At the time of Woodstock, I was just 13, but I used to see these exotic hippy creatures and I did look on with envy. How could you not? In an ideal world, I would have loved to have been a hippy – but I might have been a bit strait-laced. It was my fantasy.
Fantasy has had some problems with being too repetitive, in my opinion. I try to read what other people are doing – and say, ‘How can I add to this rather than just recycle it? How can I stand on Tolkien’s shoulders rather than stand tied to his kneecaps?’
Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.
For me, a great fantasy is real people, a world I recognise, human struggle and magic. You’ve got to have magic to make a fantasy work. But I like my magic to be subtle. I don’t want magic coming out of the hands of wizards. I want it to be pervading, sinister somehow.
The campaigns and the models in them create the fantasy around the brand. It has always been about having strong images. Without that, we could not have gone into all the categories we did. It really has been the foundation from where the house of Guess was built.
I don’t like fantasy where a king snaps his fingers and suddenly a whole army appears and goes off to war – he’s got to feed them, he’s got to pay them, he’s got to take care of the camp followers and the gamblers and the people who cause disorder.
The British boys really, really go nuts… to them, an older woman is sexy, and it’s an incredible fantasy… I think the American fantasy is still about men wanting control. Maybe American men don’t feel as in control of their lives.
I’m living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks.
As a very young writer – kindergarten through about fifth grade – I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the ‘Guinness Book of World Records.’
I’ve always felt that ‘X-Men’ was about something serious. It wasn’t just fantasy.
I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.
In fact, if you have a crime committed against you, and you go to have hypnosis, you can’t testify. Because there’s no way to test what is real, what’s fact, what’s fantasy.
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.
Vampirism, for me, was a way to live in fantasy and have superpowers, but not just in a really perfect, happy, everything is great way. It’s superpowers with a cost. It’s having to be the villain, and what do you do about that.
I like the order and simplicity of sports. They have an ending. You can argue with your friends about it, but in the end, you still like sports. I almost love the fantasy world of sports more than the real world.
I’m going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It’s like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he’s stuck – in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.
