Quotes About Imagination

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have... excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams...

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death

I dreamed you, I wished for your existence.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.

I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: 'Excuse me, it was all a dream,' and by that time I may have found one who will say: 'Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.

I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The living out in excess kills the imagination and the intensity

He worked on small canvases with a touch as light as a cobweb and coloring made of mirages. He lived there, at the bottom of the sea...

Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh