Quotes About Imagination

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish the idea lets go and runs off.

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had the strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with a buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry.

No to write, for many of us, is to die.

The sun rose yellow as a lemon. The sky was round and blue. The birds looped clear water songs in the air. Will and Jim leaned from their windows. Nothing had changed. Except the look in Jim's eyes. Last night. . . said Will. Did or didn't it happen?

And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curiouser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

The things you're looking for...are in the world, but the only way the average chap will see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house, there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why I feel like I'm putting on weight, I feel fat. I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and don't konw what. I might even start reading books.

He had written books of a lifetime, on the airs of vast rooms in vast buildings, and had it all fly out the vents.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.

If it seems I've come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange -- we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible.

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it's good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.)

Well, Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds.

After all, each story is a Rorschach Test, isn't it? And if people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I cannot prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them, anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, as we know, he simply isn't there.