Quotes About Imagination

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one--and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Worlds are there to be conquered." I was light but I meant what I said. We were living at a time when for the adventurous and imaginative man anything was possible. Bonaparte had inspired, no doubt in a bad way, an entire generation.

Gözler kapal?yken, gerçek dünya baÅŸlar.

Was hätt' ein Weiberkopf erdacht, das er nicht zu beschönen wüßte!

Stories are not a waste of time

Impossible? the goldfish man said. Don't you see? Even fates written in the Book of Fortunes can be changed. How can anything be impossible?

Bringing fortune to our house! Making Fruitless Mountain bloom! You're always wishing to do impossible things! Stop believing stories and stop wasting your time.

What kept Minli from becoming dull and brown like the rest of the village were the stories her father told her every night at dinner. She glowed with such wonder and excitement

Almost all men respect the Storyteller... You can mãe time disappear. You can bring us to places we have never dreamed of. You can make us feel sorrow and joy and peace. You have great magic.

He watched her small figure disappear and brought the bag back to his shoulder to continue onward. But before he took another step, he looked at the tall mountain that touched the moon, its peak soaring into the sky as if holding it up. Misty clouds draped softly, but up where the mountain met the moon, Rendi thought he could still see what he expected to be there. There was old Mr. Shan, the Spirit of the Mountain, who sat at the mountain's tip with the book in his lap.

Remember what the dormouse said

For male readers: imagine being nine months constipated having inadvertently swallowed a coconut whole, and then being asked to lie on an operating table, legs apart, with lots of people watching dressed in silly clothes. Would you be able to shit?

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.