Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Storytelling, mythology and film provide a lot of hope but, on the flip side, can also create delusion.

I can write, He floated up to the ceiling, and a baby rabbit came out of his pocket, grew wings, and flew away. And you will believe that it really happened. That's magic, isn't it?

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

A book is either autobiography or a novel.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.

People don't like reality, they like crazy stories.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

Life ain't the movies.

Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.