Quotes About Imagination

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

It's also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources.

I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.

There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

I believe that stories find writers, writers don't find stories. With the 'Pendragon' series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.

It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.

I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

Without writers, none of the entertainment would exist. It starts with writers. Writers are the most important piece of the entire puzzle.

I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.