Quotes About Imagination

We must allow the artist his subject. It is only what he makes of it that we can judge.

Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his faculties - his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his senses - had a hand in the game. (Chapter 4)

that's the delightful thing about art, that there's always more to learn and more to do;it grows bigger the more one uses it and meets more questions the more they come up...

He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.

What he'd find there, of course, was up to Pete. But he was sure there were magicians in Tampico and leopard-skins and golden thrones in Juba. Dragons and pirates and white temples where magic dwelt. And best of all, the places he didn't know about yet, the ones that would come as surprises. Oh, not entirely pleasant surprises. There should be a hint of peril, a touch of terror, to emphasize the brightness of adventure... (Before I Wake...)

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. ~ Henry Louis Mencken

Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized hero of our time - and of all time.

All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.

Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.

The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new ambiance.

The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.

One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can life the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.

A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible.

There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.

In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another.

Ideas are living creatures, active and activating, like flowers.

I was polluting the bed with dreams.

She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted them to sparkle, not to chew. Words...words...words... She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words... When every other memory of her had fled there would remain-HER WORDS.