Quotes About Imagination

As the blind Milton's memory of light The deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone, Wrought joys for them surpassing all things known In our restricted sphere of sound and sight-- So while the glaring streets of brick and stone Vex with heat, noise, and dust from morn till night, I will give rein to Fancy, taking flight From dismal now and here, and dwell alone, With new-enfranchised senses.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.

Dreams take short cuts.

While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He did not see the connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections--like a plumber.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

I have been too fond of stories.

Food and shelter are very nice, but without stories to hear and tell, we might as well be the walking dead.