Quotes About Imagination

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.

One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

Era la enamorada de todas las novelas, la heroína de todos los dramas, la vaga ella de todos los libros de versos.

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.

Car tout bourgeois, dans l'échauffement de sa jeunesse, ne fût-ce qu'un jour, une minute, s'est cru capable d'immenses passions, de hautes entreprises. Le plus médiocre libertin. a rêvé des sultanes ; chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d'un poète.

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

Every bourgeois in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or a minute, has believed himself capable of a grand passion, of a high endeavor. Every run-of-the-mill seducer has dreamed of Eastern queens. Not a lawyer but carries within him the débris of a poet.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes." ? Gustave Flaubert

Chaque soir, quand sa besogne était finie, il regagnait sa mansarde, et il cherchait dans les livres de quoi justifier ses rêves.