Quotes About Imagination

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer

Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold.

Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

Langston Hughes: Gather out of star-dust Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust Not for sale.

You wouldn't be a writer if reading hadn't enriched your soul more than other pursuits.

W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

Miles Davis saying, "Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.

I could make it vivid and funny, and even exaggerate some of it so that the event became almost mythical, and the people involved seemed larger, and there was a sense of larger significance, of meaning.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is a literally how I have survived being here at all. Someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images – some of which I'll never forget – flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination.

I tell the six-year-olds that if they want to have great lives, they need to read a lot or listen to the written word. If they rely only on their own thinking, they will not notice the power that is all around them, the force-be-with–you kind of power. Reading and writing help us take the blinders off so we can look around and say "Wow," so we can look at life and our lives with care, and curiosity, and attention to detail, which are what will make us happy and less afraid.

Writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

Writing Down the Bones

Ferlinghetti writing "I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder

Soon I got lost in a good way, with a book, which is also to get found, and my staunchest lifelong light.

You don't get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous.

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.

Writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained

You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.