Quotes About Imagination

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality.

The artist gives the beholder increasingly 'more to do,' he draws him into the magic circle of creation and allows him to experience something of the thrill of 'making' which had once been the privilege of the artist

That power of holding on to an image that Ruskin describes so admirably is not the power of the eidetic; it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships present in one's mind that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the great artist.

He spread his paint on canvas-here light, there dark-till it looked like a streaked agate stone, and then "with little trouble," he made a finished painting emerge surprisingly out of the chaos of mixed paint.

With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of the pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up.(quoting C.S. Lewis)

Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

But lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.

for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?

We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.

They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.

Then she turned westward, to gaze at the swirling gold. Just where the river rounded the hill the sun caught it. Fairyland must lie above the bend, and its precious liquid was pouring towards them past Charles's bathing shed.

In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.

The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days.