Quotes About Imagination

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy. The idea is false on the evidence. Like shit, change happens.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

And what makes you think you're a main character in anything but your own mind?

She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.

If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one–probably a child–who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story  . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

Anyone who doesn't think the imagination can kill is a fool.

When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets

Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

A person could see a lot without ever leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools.

and the rain went rollin down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n' squiggled on her check and forehead like black veins.

Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire.

But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.

There are also books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

If someone had asked him, "Ben, are you lonely? , " he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams...

Don't wait for the muse.

People who shine can sometimes see things that are gonna happen, and I think sometimes they can see things that did happen. But they're just like pictures in a book.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is.