The imaginary world has always been the most fun place for me to be.
I spent my childhood in an imaginary world - probably because I needed an escape. I think that's one of the reasons people have imaginations - because they can't maintain existence here.
Sometimes I'm stressed and I'm sick of things and I need to forget about them for a while, so in Harry Potter you're taken to this wonderful imaginary world where everything is so different.
I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.
Initially I probably didn't even call it acting, but dressing up or something. As a kid I think you fully imagine the world in which you want to inhabit, so you put some clothes on and just kind of freely imagine this world, and it's a total imaginary world.
All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.
Possibly the strangest book ever made, the 'Codex Seraphinianus' is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy - it is written in an alphabet no one can understand - and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.
Using the device of an imaginary world allows me in some strange way to go to the central issues - it's one of many ways to express feelings about real people, about real human relationships.