Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You don't need millions of dollars or millions of people if you're doing what you love.”
― Felicia Day

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
― Stephen King

“You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”
― Stephen King

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. ”
― Clive Barker

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
― Clive Barker

“We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
― clive barker

“Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.”
― Clive Barker

“There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.”
― Clive Barker

“So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”
― Clive Barker

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.”
― Clive Barker

“To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!”
― Clive Barker

“At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.”
― Clive Barker

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanshawe

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle-earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Reality is broken. Game designers can fix it.”
― Jane McGonigal

“It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.”
― Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

“The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.”
― Jane McGonigal

“The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a game is it's too easy.”
― Henry Jenkins

“...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
― Henry Jenkins

“[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.”
― Clay Shirky