Quotes About Imagination

Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, one overtaking the other.

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, [...]; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors.

The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.

You have to be an artist and a madman...

What are these hopes, and who is this savior?" "Imagination," replied Cincinnatus.

One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.

I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice.

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière , sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.

Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting

Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules.