Quotes About Imagination

It reads better than it lives .

This may sound weird, but I love to listen to whale music when a guy goes down on me. I have all these bizarre underwater fantasies. Sometimes I even imagine that I'm the female whale and that I'm being called by the male whale, with his like, what, fifty-foot cock.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn't say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don't know you very well, are likely to think you're rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.

Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.

When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.

While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.

A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace...

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

Only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards.

Auch dies ein vertrautes Element - das Grauen, das er nicht sehen kann. Aus sicherer Entfernung beobachtete Katastrophen. Dem vielfachen Tod zuschauen, aber niemanden sterben sehen. Kein Blut, keine Schreie, überhaupt keine menschlichen Gestalten, nur die willfährige, in die Leere entlassene Phantasie.

the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason.

He needed that time edged with boredom in which fantasy could flourish.

I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up.