Quotes About Imagination

paradise cannot be constructed out of concrete.

Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.

Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity.

Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.

One method of economy is 'leaving out' - firstly, everything that by the writer's standards is irrelevamt, in the second place everything that is obvious, i.e. which the reader can and should supply out of his own imagination. 'The more bloody good stuff you cut out the more bloody good your novel will be,' Hemingway advised a young writer.

It is perhaps significant that the German word for the Creator is Schopfer, and for certain schopfen-'to scoop' in the sense of drawing water in buckets from a well. The Creator is thus visualized as creating the world out of His own depth, and the creative mind with a small c is supposed to apply a similar procedure.

Every creative act involves... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.

material is the source for everything seen or said or done on the stage.

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

A book, a poem, a play — they start as fantasms but they end up as things, like a box of crackers or an automobile tire.

LEBEAU: How about some solidarity with Gypsies? Just because they don't work nine to five? WAITER—a small man, middle-aged, still wearing his apron: I know this one. I've made him go away a hundred times. He and his wife stand outside the café with a baby, and they beg. It's not even their baby. LEBEAU: So what? They've still got a little imagination.

the piteous demand that the artist should be shut up in a flower-garden, and forbidden to peep through the hedge into the world.

It is the artist's privilege to seek his material where he pleases, and it is no man's privilege to say him nay.

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

Swallows and Amazons for-ever!

Wild Cat Island

It was like exploring a place that you have seen in a dream, where everything is just where you expect it and yet everything is a surprise.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.

Arthur Rimbaud

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?