Fantastical Elements Quotes

Action films have a certain illogicalness to them. They're what we call, when we're working, 'exaggerated realism.'

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville.

Films are dreams. Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination. For me, it would be impossible to do a film that is so precise, that resembles real life.

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a delusional Housewife in possession of an audience must be in want of a ludicrous storyline.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.

I never write anything without humor, just because I like humor, but at the same time, it is a way for anything fantastical to become relatable.

It's hard for me to consider something in cinema or theater as something realistic.

In my opinion, it's more interesting to see magic happening in a world that feels grounded. If the world is already crazy, then anything can happen. So it's better to start with something real.

I just like magical, fantastical stuff. I don't really see it as surreal when I'm writing. It's just, I write, and then I have an idea, and usually, they're quite odd.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

When writing fantastical literature, your biggest problem is getting your audience to believe the fantastical elements of your story.

I love science fiction when it's well-done. I don't like campy stuff. I don't like stuff that's too fantastical.

I think that the attraction to camp is its irreverence, it's strange, it in no way reflects reality while using real characters.

For me, fantasy and speculative science fiction are the genres that feel closest to how I feel about being alive. Like, when I feel the most invigorated by just even a walk down the block in twilight, when the street lamps are just coming on and there's mist and some shadowy thing in silhouette in a window, I naturally invest all of those things with deep mythology and mystery and meaning. I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don't.

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

Many comedic stars have tried to a do a 'Night at the Museum' type film, in which an everyday Joe reacts to insane circumstances. Many flat out failed.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

The approach of 'Game of Thrones' is similar to 'The Lord of the Rings' in that it treats its source material almost like history, and it focuses as much on the human drama as it does on anything fantastical.

When I'm watching television or a movie, I like to see stories that are extraordinary. I don't need it be something that is, 'Well this makes more sense to me because I can see this happening to me, or this happened to me.'

The cat, covered in dust and standing on its hind legs, bowed to Margarita. Round its neck it was now wearing a made-up white bow tie on an elastic band, with a pair of ladies’ mother-of-pearl binoculars hanging on a cord. It had also gilded its whiskers.