Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
The thing with drama is you're allowed to invent people who are maybe slightly better than real people.
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.
Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
I was always into fantasy characters, stories of magic, but after Red Sonja, I became obsessed with the persona, the image, of the warrior woman - the sword-wielding, defiant, fearless woman.
My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.
Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.
I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
I do like fantasy films.
A library is where you meet fascinating characters you never forget.
I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.
Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.
I love books that create worlds for me that I don't want to leave. I recently lost my entire life to Haruki Murakami - 1Q84. I tell people that book ruined my life in the best possible way. I couldn't think of anything else for weeks after I read it.
