Quotes About Imagination

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news.

We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Patriarchy appears to be everywhere. Even outer space and the future have been colonized. As a rule, even the more imaginative science-fiction writers (allegedly the most foretelling futurists) cannot/will not create a space and time in which women get far beyond the role of space stewardess.

But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek,' that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.

If you dig deep and keep peeling the onion, artists and freelance writers are the leaders in society - the people who start to get new ideas out.