Quotes About Imagination

The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy in our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, Then what happened? and the Age of Sequels began.

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for his own.

Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. The Killer Hook.

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. The Killer Hook

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum

Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.

the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things.

For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.

To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws.

Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather gave up the dream he had shared with the Werner von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it a half hour of something that had felt like peace. When those things were gone, there was a bad moment as my grandfather found himself confronted once more with the void that surrounded the planet of his heart.

She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work.

Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story.

The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

stories make life so much better.

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef - flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments.

Michael Chabon

Take care—there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

Cuando le preguntaron qué era la cosa más terrorífica con la que se había encontrando, repuso: Un folio en blanco.