Quotes About Imagination

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

It's 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. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter's voice at his ear—which had added the words "for ever." He hadn't asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.

perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

I was too far away to observe what color Enid Starkie's eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent.

strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

Try as I could—which wasn't very hard—I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.

All'improvviso mi sembra che una delle differenze tra la gioventù è la vecchiaia potrebbe essere questa: da giovani, ci inventiamo un futuro diverso per noi stessi; da vecchi, un passato diverso per gli altri. da Il senso di una fine

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that 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.

I don't believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much pre-history that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.

It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.

Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves.

When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, 'It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

cambio, es como un loro que salta de rama en rama y parlotea a la vista de todos.» Gustave se imaginaba que era una fiera salvaje: le encantaba pensar que era un oso polar, remoto, silvestre y solitario. Yo acepté esta idea suya, y hasta le dije que era un búfalo salvaje de las praderas americanas; pero es posible que no fuera más que un loro.

the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive

Why go through that stuff all over again? Don't you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own … what? Conventionality, lack of imagination

I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality?