Quotes About Imagination

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.

Adesso che non potevo più pensare a me come a un'insegnante, una scrittrice, che non potevo più indossare quello che volevo, né camminare per strada al mio passo, gridare se mi andava di farlo o dare una pacca sulla spalla a un collega maschio, adesso che tutto ciò era diventato illegale, mi sentivo evanescente, artificiale, un personaggio immaginario scaturito dalla matita di un disegnatore che una gomma qualsiasi sarebbe bastata a cancellare

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.

The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

Lolita diventa il prodotto del sogno di qualcun altro.

didn't value books ("the problem with you and your family is that you live more in books than in reality")

Right now books are in danger. One can go a step further and say that imagination and ideas are in danger, and whenever they are threatened, we know that our reality is similarly in danger.

the hostility of tyrants to imagination and ideas—is as relevant as ever.

That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all.

Leggevamo a turno, a voce alta, e le parole sembravano salire in alto per poi ricadere su di noi come rugiada.

the great works of imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions.

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

Non sminuire mai, in nessuna circostanza, un'opera letteraria cercando di trasformarla in una copia della vita reale.

It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato's

Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.