The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.
I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.
When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.
I like to be prepared enough to be completely unprepared. I don't know if I make sense, but I have a fantasy of living someone else's life. And to do that perfectly, I need to prepare myself just as properly.
The British boys really, really go nuts... to them, an older woman is sexy, and it's an incredible fantasy... I think the American fantasy is still about men wanting control. Maybe American men don't feel as in control of their lives.
And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.
When you have a script, and you're discussing what it can be, and who going to play what role, that's a kind of like a fantasy football game. You can imagine these different dream teams interpreting these characters that only exist in your head.
Basically, Urban Fantasy means D&D in New York. Ordinary people have no idea that they share the world with fantastic, supernatural creatures. It can't just be vampires or werewolves; it has to be a whole continuum of fantastic beings, with their own society within society.
Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.
I had always thought my fantasy career would be making indie films and doing my own thing. But then 'Superbad' came along, and it totally changed everything. It was so hilarious and smart and extreme; you could probably do a psychoanalysis term paper on the male sexual psyche going on there.
The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?
Unlike most traditional, season-long fantasy sports sites, which make most of their money from administrative fees and advertising, FanDuel and DraftKings take a cut of every bet. That is what bookies do, and it is illegal in New York.
I feel that good fantasy will always be in demand. I think children especially need literature that helps them escape from the real world, which is very scary to them right now.
My first airplane trip was to Paris. I had this fantasy that I would become a model, and I did!
Diana Wynne Jones' excellent book 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland' is a compendium of the sort of lazy writing that has given fantasy fiction - especially the sub-section that features elves and dwarves and other Tolkienesque elements - a bad name.
I watch '60 Minutes' and 'Dateline' and '20/20.' I work in fantasy all day, so when I go home I want to touch reality.
I love fantasy; I love imagination - that's the inner child in me.
I hope the average woman feels she needs practicality but with a little bit of fantasy. Otherwise, it's just not fashion.
I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.
People ask me whether I see 'Star Wars' as a comedy or a tragedy, but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like 'Henry V,' and partly a fantasy, like 'The Tempest.'
They shaved my head, eyebrows. This is not a sci-fi picture. It's not a fantasy picture. You're dealing with something that's supposed to be in reality. But we had a genius makeup artist.
It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.
My fantasy for children's television is that it's not really children's television, it's everybody's television.
I mean, I am my own fantasy.
So many people think that if you're writing fantasy, it means you can just make everything up as you go. Want to add a dragon? Add a dragon! Want some magic? Throw it in. But the thing is, regardless of whether you're dealing with realism or fantasy, every world has rules. Make sure to establish a natural order.
The idea that we humans are good-natured, politically correct, nonjudgmental beings is pure fantasy. We are, at the very least, judgmental.
I keep threatening to write a non-fantasy book, and they keep offering me the kind of money I can't refuse to write a fantasy. That's a good thing. I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay for my Chargers season tickets.
The constant in all the businesses I've become a part of is taking what I do and making it real for everyone. I believe fantasy and dreaming can be made a reality. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a VIP.
I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
I think George R. R. Martin made fantasy grow up. He brought a level of reality into the storytelling where you realize the good guys don't always win and anyone can die, because that's how life works. Bringing that level of reality into the story I think forced the genre to mature in a lot of ways that it hadn't prior.
I've had a love affair with the desert ever since I can remember. No matter what I wrote - contemporary romance, spy thriller, high fantasy - it was going to have a desert in it.
Fantasy fans are incredibly loyal and passionate. Other people don't want to be seen as passionate about things, they want to be cool and laconic. The great thing about fantasy fans is they'll really get behind a show.
I read 'The Hobbit' when I was twenty and first reading modern science fiction and fantasy. I followed it up with 'The Lord of the Rings,' which I still reread from time to time, but of the lot of it, I prefer 'The Hobbit.'
There have been many different artists that have been inspirational. I suppose the question is directed to what was the reason why I went into fantasy illustration.
