Quotes About Imagination

I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation

feel as if I'm visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united. Tealing

Tossing the chalk thoughtfully for a moment, I decided what to do. I wrote 'The cat sat on the mat' once in copperplate English, then translated into Latin, then French and finally, for good measure, in Italian.

We don't always want to read about everyday things – and that silly stuff is so much fun to parody.

I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Books are not life, however much we may wish they were

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?

Parece-me que pode ser esta uma das diferenças entre a juventude e a idade: quando somos jovens, inventamos futuros diferentes para nós; quando somos velhos, inventamos passados diferentes para os outros.

Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.