Quotes & Sayings About Fantasists

President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a 'world order' dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. — Robert Fisk

Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. — W.G. Sebald

When it came to time travel, science and science fiction and fantasy had flip-flopped. Nobody was going to create a machine that traveled to the future or the past. Time machines might be accepted in science fiction as an enabling device to get the story moving, but they're like faster-than-light space ships-- neither one is going to happen any time soon, not with any technology we know how to implement.
The guys who had it figured were the fantasists, Dennis. The Finneys and the Mathesons and the Ellisons and the Serlings. No machines and no advanced physics, at least not most of the time. Just an overpowering desire. Just need and longing and pain and regret and the right talisman or the right surroundings. Put the right person in the right place, and perhaps with the right objects, and the potential for time travel is there. — Tony Rabig

Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily. — Amit Chaudhuri

Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them. — Maajid Nawaz

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them. — George R R Martin

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort... — Paul Theroux

Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players. — Douglas Rushkoff

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. — Wendell Berry

Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead. — Alan Moore

it's the way he uses language - which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There's no sense of nostalgia. There's no medieval floridness. There's no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It's very straight, and very clean - there's no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details. — Joe Fassler

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye. — Cynthia Ozick

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. — David Mitchell

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. — Andrew Sullivan

Against fantasists. - The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so only to others. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Now, it's undeniably true that male writers (including yours truly) are generally and commercially allowed to write about "girl stuff" without being penalized for doing so. In part this is the same old shit it's always been ... I've said before that men who write mostly about men win prizes for revealing the human condition, while women who write about both men and women are filed away as writing "womens' issues." Likewise, in fantasy, the imprimatur of a dude somehow makes stuff like romance, relationship drama, introspection, and adorable animal companions magically not girly after all.
In a sense, we male fantasists are allowed to be like money launderers for girl cooties."
[Game of Thrones and Invisible Cootie Vectors (blog post, March 30, 2014)] — Scott Lynch

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination. — Ben Okri

Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration
and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth. — David Eddings

Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real. — Madeleine L'Engle