Quotes About Imagination

I use a library the same way I've been describing the creative process as a writer — I don't go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it . You can only go with loves in this life.

Go, children. Run and read. Read and run. Show and tell.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.

The ideas will follow me. When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

It is not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, 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.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. — Ray Bradbury

There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases: What if . . . ? If only . . . If this goes on

Ya no existe el cohete. Nunca existió. Ni la gente. No hay nadie en todo el universo. Nunca hubo nadie. Ni planetas. Ni estrellas. Eso decía. Y luego algo acerca de sus pies y sus piernas y sus manos: No mas manos, decía. Ya no tengo manos. Nunca las tuve. Ni cuerpo. Nunca lo tuve. Ni boca. Ni cara. Ni cabeza. Nada. Solamente espacio. Solamente el abismo.

That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.

Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconcious. And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.

This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your creative muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes.

Ray Bradbury

Fall in love and stay in love. Explode. Don't intellectualize. Get passionate about ideas. Cram your head full of images. Stay in the library. Stay off the internet and all that crap. Read all the great books. Read all the great poetry. See all the great films. Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode.

No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

Once upon a time! What kind of talk is that?

You don't ask a dream if it is real, or you wake up.

For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.

The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.