Quotes About Imagination

Is there anything more real than what we have created in our minds?

Things she had said started to come back to him. How she out-stared a snake in the backyard. How the soldiers would stop buses and commandeer a woman at the slightest whim. How one day, as she was daydreaming in the office, three male-spirits came in through the walls and, with their heads facing backwards, tried to force her to make love to them.

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future. You can tell the strength of an age by the imaginative truth-grasping vigour of its storytellers. Stories are matrices of thought. They are patterns formed in the mind. They weave their effect on the future. To be a storyteller is to work with, to weave with, the material of time itself.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

So books should be lived to be read. And life should be dreamt to be lived.

I believe that story changes reality.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

a dream can be the highest point of a life

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer. Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination?

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it.

And at other times when Kellyanne held out Pobby and Dingan were real I would just sit there saying, "Are not. Are not. Are not," until she got bored of saying, "Are. Are. Are," and went running out screaming with her hands over her ears. And many times I've wanted to kill Pobby and Dingan, I don't mind saying it.

must be prepared to think outside the box,

I'm a firm believer in thinking inside the box. The first thing I do when approaching a new project is to give myself rigid guidelines and precise limits. That's how I begin to think. If I were told that I could create anything in any medium, using any amount of space and any amount of time, I'd stand in a field and scream.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

S'interruppe.<> ( Ho sognato di te )

Since the dawn of time, nearly every man (and I'd wager to guess most women) has, at his most visceral level, secretly desired for one thing - to be standing triumphantly atop a heaping pile of his slain enemies, holding a gigantic axe aloft while some unbelievably attractive member of whatever gender he's attracted to desperately clutches his leg like it's the last life raft on the HMS Titanic.

The light in which the city is cast by writers, poets and artists helps determine the kind of cities we get.

No world is rock real. As a certain poet in Dublin once said to me when, as a young journalist, I was emerging one enchanted evening, from a reception in a fashion-modelling agency, and had marvelled to him about the unreality, or it seemed to me to be, of the world in which those beautiful creations pirouetted. No world, the poet said sadly, is rock real.

And when he dreams he does not want to write, he does not have the power to dream he wants to write; and when he dreams he wants to write, he does not have the power to dream he does not want to write.

mar donde el pensamiento navega a su antojo sin llegar jamás a ninguna orilla;

La imaginación tiene sus propios motivos y nos los oculta.

In a world without cable channels and satellite television, videos and DVDs, movies and the Internet, an artist's creation was the one ever-present object that had to serve as a source of pleasure and inspiration over and over again, year after year, without becoming stale.