Quotes About Imagination

My imagination? No, I don't think it's VIVID at all. On the contrary, it's not nearly potent enough. My poor imaginative faculties have always needed...extentions. That's why I'm here with you. You're smiling again, or rather you're SMIRKING. Funny word, smirk. Rather like an extraterrestrial surname. Simon Smirk. How do you think that sounds?

And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.

A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature's exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.

And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.

I could almost hear their voices asking, 'Why here, why now?' But of course they could have just as easily been asking, 'Why not here, why not now?' It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason.

I felt the kind of acute anticipation that a child might experience at a carnival, where each lurid attraction incites fantastic speculations, while unexpected desires arise for something which has no specific qualities in the imagination yet seems to be only a few steps away.

One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

Although few would own up to it, even to themselves, we love havoc in both life and art. What we call "evil" captivates us from childhood to old age, never paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven.

My only hope lay in my ability to make a metamorphic recovery, to accept in every way the nightmarish order of things so that I could continue to exist as a successful organism even without the protective nonsense of the mind and the imagination, the protective dream of having any kind of soul or self.

I realize that what I have written so far about supernatural horror stories sounds as if my goal in writing them is to demoralize and depress my readers. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. In my literary philosophy, if story fails to entertain readers, to captivate them with characters and incidents they never could have imagined themselves, then that story has failed.

If there were dreams to sell,What would you buy?Some cost a passing-bell;Some a light sigh.

If there were dreams to sell,... Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rang the bell, What would you buy?

If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

Hell is not merely preferable to heaven-it's the only clear notion of an afterlife-of a goal worth striving toward-that human imagination has been able to devise.

The toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin.

Sometimes the whole world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful

In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.

So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.

But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don't possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It's as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed.

Creativeness is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.