Quotes About Imagination

A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.

I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.

The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

I think that's what a lot of writers do, create a totally fantastical scenario that is a reflection of something else going on in their life.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

Writers are, for the most part, crazy people. We're like Hephaestus of the forge. We're gnarled. We're curled over. We walk with a limp.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.