Quotes About Imagination

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye, and what then? —S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke Ã¢â'¬â€œ Aye, and what then?' S. T. Coleridge Anima Poetae

Of course. Remember, I've seen you in her. And it's wonderful.

Dreams are doorways...If we but have the courage to step over the threshold.

and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader's dreams with dreams of their own.

Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.

I don't plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Dream! Forge yourself and rise Out of your mind and into others. Men, be women. Fish, be flies. Girls, take beards. Sons, be your mothers. The future of the world now lies In coral wombs behind our eyes.

He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality.

That which can be imagined need never be lost.

Here let me be quite clear: the primary impulse behind such creations is not escapism. That implies a kind of cowardice in the face of the world, which is not what inspires such visions. Quite the reverse. It is a hunger to see more clearly that fuels the true fantasist. A desire to express the world's transforming heart.

That which is imagined need never be lost.

No matter how fantastical the story, true life experience gives it credibility. Dropping in elements of your own life, telling bits of detail borrowed from your memory bank, give the reader a feeling of assurance. It's the old story about how to tell a lie. Don't make it all up, tell the lie with large dollops of truth. The truth can give foundation to the most outrageous of lies.

You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.

Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.

Arnie had always called her a dreamer, and maybe he was right about that.

Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.

It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.

I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.

A book is dead until you read it.