Quotes About Imagination

What would be worse than being born blind? She replied, To have sight without vision.

The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos.

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an unchartered land, or opened a new Haven to the Human Spirit.

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends.

It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing. They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren stare.

How easy it is to fly on paper wings!

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

Kids think you just sit down and start writing. I always tell them you never do that.

One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

The places where I have the nameless character in 'My Name Is Legion' meet his boss are real places I've been to. That works well for tax purposes, writing into my stories the places I've actually visited.

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.