Quotes About Fantasy
LISTED BY AUTHOR [web page in progress]
Alexander, Lloyd
“Having once believed wholeheartedly in something, we seldom lost the ability to believe. It is like learning to ride a bicycle. …[T]his capacity for values comes at a fairly early age. The child who does not develop it before adolescence may have trouble developing it at all. Young children yearn for values; the younger they are, the clearer they want those values to be. They crave true heroes, not antiheroes (they can find out about them later); they may have a taste for justice, mercy, and courage, which may be naïve and unrealistic to adults.”
– from Lloyd Alexander, “Wishful Thinking—Or Hopeful Dreaming?” The Horn Book Magazine, August 1968, pp. 383-390. Reprinted in Fantasists on Fantasy, p. 146-47.
Alexander, Lloyd
“Having once glimpsed [fantasy’s] nature, having once been caught up in a great dream, we can always dream again—and hope the dream will come true.”
– ibid
Allen, Roger McBride
“I once tossed out the concept of flying pigs in a class exercise wherein I was deliberately dealing with absurd plot elements. Just to show me it could be done, half the students came back with flying-pig stories. Some of them not bad. With one possible exception, every single story could have been improved by removing the pig.”
– from Roger McBride Allen, “The Standard Deviations of Writing,” posted on sfwa.org website
Barron, T.A.
“I think of a legend as a tapestry. In this case [the Arthurian legend], the tapestry of Merlin’s tales, which is as rich and luminous and vibrant as any tapestry that’s ever been woven, has [in my view] a giant hole in it: the crucial, formative time when this young man would have found out he had particular powers, when he would have learned his greatest lessons from nature. So I wanted to weave a few threads that I hope are as luminous as the surrounding tapestry into that hole. And make sure that they fit just perfectly.”
– from an interview with T.A. Barron by Therese Littleton, Amazon.com