Quotes About Imagination

you can dream about something for so long, but sometimes reality doesn't exactly live up.

Truth is stranger than fiction, after all.

Aria was younger and afraid to go to sleep because she thought a giant eel lived in her closet.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don't invite someone into your world very easily.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.

Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.