Quotes About Imagination

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggest that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.

Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.

That's really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures—it's the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that's all. It's as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.

The world's most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world--

if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.

He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it's the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown.

Sometimes he makes us live.

He (Tom Riley) gestured toward the canvases in the main room. What are they, really? I mean, no bullshit. Because - I wouldn't say this to very many people - they remind me of the way life was inside my head when I wasn't taking my pills. They're just make-believe, I (Edgar) said. Shadows. I know about shadows, he said. You just want to be careful they don't grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power's out.

Insofar as story is concerned, and pleasure is concerned, there are not enough Stephen Kings to go around.

folk-tales are, at best, generally no more than lies set in rhyme.

It's really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can't sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep.

eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business

What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed

What do you read? I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer ?Everything I can get my hands on!? is true enough, but not helpful.

The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.

The idea of ghosts gave his child's mind no trouble at all... According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost.

I don't talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them.

A crazy certainty had arisen in his mind: a hand - or perhaps a claw - was going to swim up from the grayness of the Kindle's screen, grab him by the throat, and yank him in.

Some moments are beyond imagination.

No me interesa la credibilidad, sino la libertad, y he descubierto que escribir puede proporcionarla.

Un'idea è come un germe del raffreddore: prima o poi finisce che qualcuno lo prende.