Quotes About Imagination

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

Anyone who expects to create, be it as a scientist or artist, scholar or writer, needs self-confidence, even bravado. How else can one dare to imagine understanding what no one else has understood, discovering what no one else has discovered? Where does this confidence come from? Fortunately, every young person is blessed with some of it. It is part of human character.

The boy may wrestle, when Night--working Fancy steals him to the arms Of nymph oft wish'd awake, and, 'mid the rage Of the soft tumult, ev'ry turgid cell Spontaneous disembogues its lucid store, Bland and of azure tinct.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.

The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.

You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.

There is no last page to the poetry of John Ashbery. You will have had the experience; you can always have it again.

just as children imagine a prayer / is merely silence...

Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.

I started to write when I was 11 or 12, doing bad imitations of Joyce. There were always white blossoms falling into the grave at the end of every story.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

The house of fiction has many windows ... sometimes such a simple thing as suggesting to a student that perhaps realism instead of fantasy may be a more sympathetic genre, or humor instead of the opposite, or the novel rather than the short story--sometimes a simple suggestion like that can be the one that makes things click.

There's a great difficulty in making choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any *one* of the others it would not be found inferior. All equally attractive but none finally inviting.

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

To the French, sin—provided it is conceived with imagination and carried off with flair—is like the dust on an old bottle of burgundy, the streaks of gray in the hair of a loved one, the gleam of long, loving use on the mahogany of an ancient cabinet. It's evidence of endurance, of survival, of life.

But all this means nothing. Gerda is not there. Only in my mind. The mind that is helped and solaced by the same demons, the same friends, who have destroyed the mind of an Iris who is close to me now, closer to me than ever, and yet far away. Walking in a dream, with Iris beside me.

Supervision, he says, is really a shared fantasy of what is actually going on – it is the result of a "trainee trying to imagine what he and his patient have been doing together and the supervisor (plus case seminar participants) trying to imagine it too." Supervision works best, he says, "if all parties remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true.

He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream "Dreeb" are more to be pitied than censured.

He held the book up to his nose. It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read. He threw the book onto his bed and went to his suitcase. After rummaging about for awhile, he came up with a long, narrow box of chocolate-covered mints. He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

If I were serious I would never have become a wizard, would I?