Quotes About Imagination

I told myself there was time. Of course, that's what we always tell ourselves, isn't it? We can't imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer's life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

He didn't need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side — you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched.

I think we're actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.

For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.

Plus, dreams don't have to be logical, do they? Dreams are poems from the subconscious.

In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.

There are other worlds than these.

The poet Edgar Allan Poe described the false awakening phenomenon long before Carl Jung was born. He wrote, 'All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.' Have I answered your question?

We all write fiction when we write about the past.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world, that's what I believe. They are a special gift.

I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

If stone-sober people can fuck like they're out of their minds -- can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe -- why shouldn't writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?

I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few - like Scott - harness their dreams and turn them into horses.

Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow.

Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.

There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.