I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

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

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

You may say, ‚Well, dragons don’t exist.‘ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‚predator‘ and the category ‚dragon‘ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

I loved being Maleficent. I was quite sad to put my staff down and put my horns away because somehow, she just lives in a different world.

I sell escapism.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

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

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t want to open up my cornflakes and find that they’re full of pebbles… You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn’t.

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

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

My imagination is a twisted place.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

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.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s ‚Runaway‘ music video. Something inside me clicked, like, ‚That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.‘

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home – you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‚The Lord of the Rings‘ is intensely… landscaped. But ‚Discworld‘ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.