Quotes About Imagination

for his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific – the essays, the poetry and the drama. All this, he felt, he would now re-enter. He could inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before.

his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific – the essays, the poetry and the drama. All this, he felt, he would now re-enter. He could inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before.

Is he 'abstract', or 'extract'? Cubish or tube-ist? A figmentist? Or pigmentist?

His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tossed flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.

Not only were the books lost and the thoughts in the books, but what was to him, perhaps, the most searching loss of all, the hours of rumination which lifted him above himself and bore him upon their muffled and enormous wings. Not a day passed but he was reminded of some single volume, or of a series of works, whose very positions on the walls was so clearly indented in his mind.

he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only a different colour to his own iron marble but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door.

Boredom comes from a boring mind.

Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.

There was a time when I could put the palm of my hand flat on the front of a tattered paperback called The Dying Earth and feel the magic seeping through the cardboard: Turjan of Miir, Liane the Wayfarer, T'sais, Chun the Unavoidable. Nobody I knew had so much as heard of that book, but I knew it was the finest book in the world. (Castle of Days, 211)

we don't write songs, we write rivers

Now you get off that Pegasus and come down here and start acting your age! Honey, he's four thousand years old, Veronica said.

He turned into a rhinocerous, Ms. Smirt said. He does that, Sabrina said.

Don't disrespect the sword marshmallow.

Depth is not something the writer puts into a book; it's something the reader takes out of it.

I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.

Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.

You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.

If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late!