Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.
There's a very strong force in Tolkien's characters.
There's lots of Tolkien that must be confusing to people.
The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.
Tolkien didn't just write 'The Hobbit,' he created a whole world.
Peter Jackson has just really earned the right to be Tolkien's torchbearer on screen.
I really respect and admire Tolkien. I think he was the most honest of the Romantics.
Tolkien made dwarf sign language because, you know, it's too loud to talk in the mines.
Everyone in the '80s was reading Tolkien; he invented this whole medieval fantasy genre.
I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.
Tolkien was influenced by South Africa when he was writing 'Lord of the Rings.' It's really epic scenery.
'The Hobbit' by J. R. R. Tolkien was the first book I enjoyed. I was 14 and when I finished I started it again.
I didn't want to write a pure fantasy novel, though I love those and grew up on J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuin.
I have been illustrating Tolkien's books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.
Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.
When I told my mom I was going to audition for 'The Hobbit,' she said, 'Well, you've always loved Tolkien.' And she was right.
I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds.
Tolkien fans reacted so strongly to 'Lord Of The Rings' as a franchise because it stayed true; the heart of it was true to the book.
Tolkien was quite a religious man, and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.
Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.
I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
I was a massive Tolkien fan. 'The Hobbit' was... my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.
The Beatles once approached Stanley Kubrick to do 'The Lord Of The Rings.' This was before Tolkien sold the rights. They approached him, and he said, 'No.'
Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.
I read all of the books by Tolkien, including 'The Hobbit,' when I was in my twenties, and his deep love of nature and all things green resonates deeply with me.
I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.
When you succeed at creating your own world, whether it's in any realm - like Tolkien was able to do - and people are able to enter that world, it's a special thing.
The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late '60s, the film rights.
I loved Tolkien and I loved 'Star Wars,' which was the first memory that I have being in a movie theater. And, of course, that was the defining movie for me as a kid.
Elves have this superhuman strength, yet they're so graceful. Tolkien created them to be angelic spirits, but I also saw Legolas as something out of the Seven Samurai.
I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.
What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.
Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.
I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.
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.
There's no doubt that prog rock has an image problem: many musicians hate the label, and too many people associate it with 10-minute drum solos and the weirder bits of JRR Tolkien.
I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read 'The Hobbit' and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.
Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.
I thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after 'Lord of the Rings.' I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.
'Lord Of The Rings' fandom was massive, worldwide, entrenched. Generally it had been part of the fans' life all their life, because they had it read to them as children; they'd become Tolkien students.
Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.
When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.
One thing Tolkien does incredibly well - and this is from a lay person's point of view; I am not scholar or anything - is that you don't have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.
I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.
I'd never heard of the 'Lord of the Rings', actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, 'Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?'
My first score for 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' was the beginning of my journey into the world of Tolkien, and I will always hold a special fondness for the music and the experience.
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.
The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of 'The Hobbit,' is of a kid's adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.