Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

It’s every girl’s dream to be a cover girl!

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

I spent more time on dark ships in danger zones than any other woman in the world.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there.

I was scared many times on Everest, but this is all part of the challenge. When I fell down a crevasse, it was pretty scary.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

I love trying new things.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

All I ever wanted to do with my life was own a little house. I did that way back with ‚Rocky,‘ so now everything I do is just icing on the cake.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.

I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It’s really great.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

The joy and love that I get from playing football are unbelievable. It is such a feeling that I want to give everything that I have got. I just enjoy it, I am living a life that I never even dreamt of.

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

Dream in a pragmatic way.