Quotes About Imagination

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.

The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they're taking us where we don't want to go.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grows without the thorn

Above, all was ocean brightness: against the flat blue sky the clouds had been sketched by an impressively swift and confident hand. What talent. I like the sky and often wonder where I'd be without it. I know: I'd be in England, where we don't have one.

I long to burst out of the world of money and into - into what? Into the world of thought and fascination.

They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they've stopped trying. Now I just dream

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.

Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.

The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open

If America would come to herself and return to her true home, "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," she would give the democratic creed a new authentic ring, enkindle the imagination of mankind and fire the souls of men. If she fails, she will be victimized with the ultimate social psychosis that can lead only to national suicide.

People say you should only write what you know. But you only write what you know because you are too fucking stupid to make anything up.

It doesn't have to exist in reality as long as people give it a kind of reality by talking and writing and arguing about it.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time

But there's a big difference between "impossible" and "hard to imagine." The first is about it; the second is about you!

The beach house is a state of mind more than a place.

Whatever it was inside of me, whatever kernel deep within that enabled me to believe in fairies, in Peter, in the Neverland itself, this was my source of strength. No one could ever take that away from me.

One does not simply read books... one climbs inside them and lives there.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

Why is it, she asked, snuggling closer, that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?