Quotes About Imagination

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about.

When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.

Probably is a world you my find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

If I can draw you the right way, maybe you'll be able to see yourself through my eyes, I said, If all goes well, of course. That's why we needs pictures. You're right--that's why we need pictures. Or literature, or music, or anything of that sort.

Your life's just begun and there's a ton of things out in the world you've never laid eyes on. Things you never could imagine.

One opposite of imagination is "efficiency.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

The more you think about illusions, the more they'll swell up and take on form. And no longer be an illusion.

They weren't fact. They were possibility. Nothing more, nothing less, but the force of the possibility was shattering.

You finally fall asleep. And when you wake up, it's true. You are part of a brand-new world.

Up till a minute ago it felt so real, but now it seems imaginary. Just a few steps is all it takes for everything associated with it to lose all sense of reality. And me--the person who was there until a moment ago--now I seem imaginary too.

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

No existe en ninguna parte del mundo real nada tan bello como las fantasías que alberga quien ha perdido la cordura.

I dream, sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

I try imagining myself in forty years, but it's like trying to picture what lies beyond the universe.

In dreams lie responsibilities.

It's as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened at all.

Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing.

What is originality, after all, but the shape that results from the natural impulse to communicate to others that feeling of freedom, that unconstrained joy?