Quotes About Imagination

You must write for all those who are thirsty to read and who can enjoy a good reading.

Le mal du pays fait cet effet-là à tout le monde : il transforme les objets de nos souvenirs en idéalités poétiques, dont les qualités grandissent à nos yeux, tandis que les défauts s'adoucissent toujours avec le temps et l'absence, et vont jusqu'à s'effacer dans notre imagination.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to real life -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

Thomas: Wow, that treehouse is like twice the size of our actual house. Pam (whispering): Don't say 'like.' Me: Oh, ha ha, let him say what he wants, let's not be-- Thomas: That treehouse is twice the size of our actual house.

There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind's predisposition determines the type of world we see.

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.

He was the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children.

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

American creative energy has always teetered on the brink of insanity.

since he'd never even heard that described as being possible. And from that day on, whenever he found himself wondering

Then came the horror: worse than I'd ever imagined. Soon my arm was about a mile down the heat vent. Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here's how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk. What's death like? You're briefly unlimited. I sailed right through the roof.

Hump my hump, My stumpy lumpy hump! Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump! I'll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump, You lumpy frumply clump.

Randall Jarrell said about stories holds true for the writers of stories: they "don't want to know, don't want to care, they just want to do as they please.

And off they went, emitting a perfect major triad via fart-noises with their mouths

In those girls I found my Rome, my Paris, my Constantinople.

It means that language can make worlds that don't and could never exist.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.