Quotes About Imagination

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

Ghost stories belong to the middle-aged, thought it's always the young who play the dramas.

it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.

I now realize that to see the Major when he isn't really there must at least be preferable to seeing him when he really is there.

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.

What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life? You could. You could call Sunday Wednesday. Be awake and living at 3 a.m. Use T-shirts instead of sheets. Eat lettuce like an apple. Blow your nose on socks. Take four unrelated people and make a family.

The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.

What Is Art?150 I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm exceedingly vulgar — and the funny thing about it is — I don't understand — I get the shapes in my head — can never make them exactly like I want to — but there is a fascination about trying — And then too — there is the delicious probability that I don't know anything about what Art is — So it's fun to make the stuff —

He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [...] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.

Libraries were full of ideas–perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.

I want [my daughter] to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.

My world was the size of a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw her

there is more Magic in the world than most scoffing people credit.

More than anything he wanted to read, because only in a book could he escape from his own dark thoughts.

In our dreams we are always young.

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness. Of course .

Preferable to accepting one's insignificance is imagining the others hate you.

I swear there are about a million rocks underneath me," [Dylan] said grouchily. Think of it as therapeutic. Like a shiatsu massage." (Sadie) You obviously have a much better imagination than me," he said.

Trying to force creativity is never good.

The world the gods made is too big for us, so we make ourselves a smaller one.

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.