Quotes About Imagination

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself!

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.

To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming.

The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.

I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.

All dreams continue in the beyond.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine sex entering the picture. Would sex enter the picture in a silk robe, or would it be as nude as a platter of cold cuts? Would sex enter the picture from the left or the right? Would it ring first, or would it just slide in slyly, too quick and slippery to be denied; or, would sex barge in forcibly, red-faced and green-bereted, pushing all other things aside?

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.

If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does.

Rules such as Write what you know, and Show, don't tell, while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Faites de beaux rêves, monsieur, she called as she put out the light. Switters had always loved that expression, Make fine dreams. In contrast to the English, Have sweet dreams, the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsiblity for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a fine dream had much wider connotations than a sweet one.

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time.

Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

If I have been given any gift in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

The function of the artist,' the Navajo answered, 'is to provide what life does not.

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

Often the things that pop out of my typewriter regale me, especially when I am trying to say something else and in a different way only to have a kind of metamorphosis take place during the act of typing and?­Ã¢â'¬â€¢­whammo!?­Ã¢â'¬â€¢a concept I hadn't counted on is strutting it's vaudeville on the page.

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, "Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don't do nothin' but confuse the puddin' out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?" It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, "In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

Those people who recognize that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists.