Quotes About Imagination

Clifford D. Simak

The first question, of course, is whether there ever was such a creature as Man. At the moment, in the absence of positive evidence, the sober consensus must be that there was not, that Man, as presented in the legend, is a figment of folklore invention. Man may have risen in the early days of Doggish culture as an imaginary being, a sort of racial god, on which the Dogs might call for help, to which they might retire for comfort.

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But history was something that you couldn't trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more acceptable than truth.

I dreamt a limitless book, A book unbound, Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance On every line there was a new horizon drawn, New heavens supposed; New states, new souls.

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

There are things that are more important than the news and what's happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that's what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It's one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we're reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

Always, worlds within worlds.

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

I dreamed a limitless book, A book unbound, Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance. On every line there was a new horizon drawn, New heavens supposed; New states, new souls. One of those souls, Dozing through some imagined afternoon, Dreamed these words. And needing a hand to set them down, Made mine.

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers.-Clive Barker

Never a truer word said or thought. Anything was possible.

What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered.

I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

Minds weren't pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked Cunning, the next, Impressionable. They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.

Where else can bubble-gum hearts, the dream travellers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave occupy the same space?

If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it. I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.

And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.