Quotes About Imagination

Orson Scott Card

Shadows that children make on the wall," said Petra, "and someone turns the light off." "Or turns a brighter one on," said Alai, "and the shadows disappear.

Orson Scott Card

but the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they tell us is true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

the fact that you have belonged to the human race more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine, find a way to believe that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of relativistic space.

Yet in your stories, you must imagine all these things, not just because it will make the world of your story more complete, but also because the very completeness of the world will transform your story and make it far more truthful. As your characters move through a more complex world, they will have to respond with greater subtlety and flexibility; the constant surprises they run into will also surprise the reader - and you!

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories.

Take one idea that you've been struggling with, combine it with a completely unrelated idea that you've also been working on, and see what comes out of the effort to reconcile both ideas into one coherent story.

The story is nothing like what you first thought it would be. But so what? It's better - richer, deeper, truer - than the original idea. The idea did its work: it got you thinking. After that, if you feel bound to stick to it no matter what, that idea becomes a ball and chain that you drag with you through the whole process.

Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

you'll dream, too.>

It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.

Science fiction is not about the future. Like all other fiction, it is about the present. It simply uses different techniques to show us who we are, who we might be, and whom we ought to become.

Para conservar la alegría de la infancia tendrías que morir siendo niño, o vivir como tal, sin convertirte nunca en hombre, sin crecde jamás.

Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

Peter, pretending to take a crushed pea out of his nose

Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.>

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.