What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural...

Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short,...

Seeks painted trifles and fantastic toys, and eagerly pursues imaginary joys.

Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters...

I’ve never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I’ve always been able to support myself in ‘the biz.’ Which is great. It’s really fantastic to be able to say that, because...

We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls ‘the fantastic,’ between ‘the marvelous’ and ‘the uncanny.’ According to Todorov, ‘The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who...

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true;...

Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

I particularly love Israel. I’ve had fantastic experiences there.

Kafamda bu dusunceler gecip duruyordur, kalbim parcalanmisti, perisandi, cevremdeki insanlarla sevinmek istiyor, ama bunu yapamiyordum. Kendimi bir hain gibi hissediyordum, o buyuk hatayi ben yapmisim gibi, buna bizzat kendi, varligim ve kisiligimle ben neden olmusum...

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

I love Alexander McQueen. I like the construction of his suits. I think it’s fantastic.

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception...

The shifting sands of the world… show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely...

good dreams can be inspirations to bring in to make reality fantastic enough to share

The fantastic cannot exist independently of that ‘real’ world which it seems to find frustratingly finite.

I like the Hotel Costes, on rue Saint Honore, a boutique hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and the Tuileries. I love the dark, moody decor as well as the fantastic scented, candlelit...

If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me.All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It’s not up to the doctors. It’s not up to the absentee angels. It’s not...

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered...

Refusing what Adorno called that ‘comfort in the uncomfortable’ taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.

Peace becomes a fantasy when egos are promoted and facts distorted.

How many times do I have to repeat this: my childhood was fantastic.

i’m an alien and I came to this planet in order to change humanity but, unfortunately, your brain is not yet in a position to take it

Henry,’ at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, ‘hast thou read Hoffman?”I should think so,’ said Henry.’What think you of him?”Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more...

As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary...

suspension of disbelief’, that beloved criterion of positivist criticism supposedly serving to establish the legitimacy of the fantastic, confirms this hegemony.

The American version of ‘The Office’ is fantastic.

(Uncle) would remark that it was impossible to get by without such a (portentous and whimsical) tone when speaking of many things of this world, and especially of the things not entirely of this world.

The influence of the future on the past,” said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly.

My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the...

Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up...

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape...

In an ideal world, I’d bounce between big projects and no-budget TV dramas with fantastic scripts.

The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose...

Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a ‘realistic’ tale. Then a gradual – or it...

Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

It should be particularly stressed that the fantastic makes no sense in an out-and-out strange world. To imagine the fantastic in it is even impossible. In a world full of marvels the extraordinary loses its...

It’s true, I don’t like the whole cutoff-shorts-and-T-shirt look, but I think you can look fantastic in casual clothes.

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be...

The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath...

for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space...

Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in...

Apparently, Stephen Hunter does a fantastic barbecue lamb.

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories – most included in this volume – which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller...

Come! our world is done:For all the witchery of the world is fled,And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.