Quotes About Imagination

In America, childhood was a time to play and be innocent, to not have to make money or do anything that counted for anything.

There's no two ways about it, Tolkien fans are a funny bunch. I should know, for I was one of them. Been there, done that, read the book, gone mad. I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.

To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

Reality is fatal whereas fantasy is something to die for.

To associate art with the artist is to forfeit art, because at this moment we are pushed into the arena of self-expression, and can be recognized only by what differentiates us from others.

A creative life has nothing to do with where you're from or how much money you earn. It's merely a reflection of the creative intellect.

The key to writing is something to be stolen. How else does one open the door to a house of thieves?

Humanity is as horrified and repulsed by real nature as it is by real death. Thus, we strike back against this formidable opponent with our sharpest weapon: our imagination. From this noble tool—born of necessity and elevated to beauty—culture was born, and the war against nature begun.

Writers are compulsive liars desperately trying to tell themselves the truth.

She imagined Ripley sitting at the typewriter with her as she wrote her novel. I imagined her sitting with me as I wrote my screenplay.

Art is the one thing man creates not out of need or luxury; therefore, it is the purest essence of his individuality.

Books do furnish a room.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

Jung's gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood.

By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.

She knew and, I think, understood the joy that my mind derived, at these first hearings, from this task of modelling a still shapeless nebula.40

We can let it have its way, or we can direct it to our will; we can force it into new paths, or we can rehearse familiar works; we can listen to it, or we can relegate it to our subconscious; but we can never get rid of it. For one so endowed – or so burdened – to live is to live music.25

Man is a creature inescapably, and often unhappily, divided; and the divisions within him recurrently impel the use of his imagination to make new syntheses. The creative consequences of his imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

But attachment theory, in my view, does less than justice to the importance of work, to the emotional significance of what goes on in the mind of the individual when he is alone, and, more especially, to the central place occupied by the imagination in those who are capable of creative achievement. Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person's life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

What he also records is his delight in discovering that, if only adults left him alone, he could, through reading, escape into a world of his own.

The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of 'adaptation through maladaptation' which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

On the other hand, less rigorous conditions of imprisonment have sometimes proved fruitful. Being cut off from the distractions of ordinary life encourages the prisoner with creative potential to call upon the resources of his imagination. As we shall see, a variety of authors have begun writing in prison, where this has been allowed; or have passed through periods of spiritual and mental turmoil which have later found expression in their works.

The hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.