Quotes About Imagination

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

AT DAWN, a juggernaut of thunder wheeled over the stony heavens in a spark-throwing tumult. Rain fell softly on town cupolas, chuckled from rainspouts, and spoke in strange subterranean tongues beneath the windows where Jim and Will knew fitful dreams, slipping out of one, trying another for size, but finding all cut from the same dark, mouldered cloth.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

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 the books have to say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

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. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man. Me? I won't stomach them for a minute.

Faber sniffed the book. "Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.

Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable of only heart murmurs for talk.

Knjige su samo jedna vrsta spremišta za mnogo toga za šta smo strahovali da bismo mogli da zaboravimo. Nema u njima uopšte ni?eg magi?nog. Magija je samo u onome što knjige kazuju, u tome kako zašivaju komade kosmosa u ode?u za nas.

Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

See the world: It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

les livres ne racontent rien. Rien que tu puisse croire ou enseigner aux autre. Si ce sont des romans, ils parlent d'êtres qui n'existent pas, de produits de l'imagination. Dans le cas contraire, c'est encore pire. Chaque professeur traite l'autre d'idiot. Chaque philosophe essaie de brailler plus fort que son adversaire. Ils galopent tous dans tous les sens, obscurcissant les étoiles, éteignant le soleil. On en sort complètement perdu.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Teachers say if you write a story you must never name what you're trying to write. Just do it. When it's over you'll know what you've done.

I memorized all of "John Carter" and "Tarzan," and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.

fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my wife, and our baby daughter.

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Because the Muse persists.

A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.