Quotes About Imagination

Afterwards he sat with the paper, the Sunday edition, immense and sleek, which had lain unopened in the hall. In it were articles, interviews, everything fresh, unimagined; it was like a great ship, its decks filled with passengers, a directory in which was entered everything that had made any difference to the city, the world. A great vessel sailing each day, he longed to be on it, to enter its salons, to stand near the rail.

Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads. The dreams are as true and manifest as the iron fences of France flashing black in the rain. More true, perhaps. They are the skeleton of all reality.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay

A blank page is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

the mind does not distinguish between reality and what is vividly imagined. It puts all of that stimuli to work in shaping your reality and your future. So it's a good idea to think right.

Write down the POV character in the scene, the objective, and a list of possible obstacles. Write a tentative outcome. Spend a couple of minutes making a list of unexpected things. Go wild. One of them will please you. Then you're ready to write.

A good story transports the reader to a new place via experience. Not through arguments or facts, but through the illusion that life is taking place on the page. Not

Whenever I go to a hospital to visit someone, I must confess that half my mind is thinking, Hm, this would make a good detail in a scene….

Take a nice, long walk. Don't think about your book. Have a little notebook or recorder with you. You'll find the "boys in the basement" sending stuff up. When they do, write it down, and keep walking. (Note: I love Stephen King's metaphor of the "boys in the basement" from his book

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers.

Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.

A poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.

Why do you live on the bank of a river?' was one of these questions. 'Because a poem in a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.

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Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen.

Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself. But why? I thought the tale of treasure might be true. You said you made it up. I know I did, but then I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

You have made the moon, The Jester said. That is the moon.

Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me.

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.