Quotes About Imagination

Did you know that could happen? Did you know you could sit in front of the screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn't last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it's awesome. It's everything, because you can have things the way you want. And I want you to still be alive. In the story you are, and always will be.

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?" "Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?" "I guess that's close enough," Susannah said. "Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbulence: you're flying into . . . the Roland Zone!

Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.

When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn't know that could happen. I

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

Working on a new idea is kind of like getting married. Then a new idea comes along and you think, 'Man, I'd really like to go out with her.' But you can't. At least not until the old idea is finished.

Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.

When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren't a character in some writer's story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe's head, or a momentary mote in God's eye?

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much  . . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

I pointed at Wireman's forehead. This is your brain, I said. Then I pointed at my easel. This is your brain on canvas.

Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

Tell you what, why don't you think of whoever wrote your first good book? I'm talking about the one that got under you like a magic carpet and lifted you right off the ground. Do you know what I'm talking about?" They know. It's on every face that faces his.

Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn't it? Shadows grow faces.

My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to just writers.

You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.

If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit

there will always be books. ... Books are real objects . Books are friends . ... They're also ideas and emotions.

Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim

He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...

I don't want to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we're all mad here, and her mother really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn't come true, which meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow.

Some people have remarkably sturdy illusions.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.