Quotes About Imagination

As long as nothing happens anything is possible...

All good novelists have bad memories.

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

Childhood is the writer's bank balance.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

Hatred is a failure of imagination.' Graham Greene, 'The Power and the Glory'.

What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.' 2

Writing is a form of therapy… Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.

When you visualized a man or 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. He

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

When you visualized a man or 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.

Memories are a form of simile: when we say something is 'like' we are remembering.

All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

There is always that 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, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

when aeroplanes—strange crates of wood

One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.