Quotes About Imagination

Flatness was construed as (was made to be) a barrier put up against the viewer's normal wish to enter a picture and dream, to make it be a space apart from life in which the mind would be free to make its own connections.

No good story is quite true.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme ... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

Jazz was way out front, clearing a path into a new era of truly free music, where the only limits were the musician's own consciousness and imagination, a music that cut across all boundaries yet still made perfect sense and swung like no music had ever swung before.

Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.

A man above thirty cannot enter into the wild visions of an enthusiastic girl.

The free pen, prone to pour out the suggestions of artless affection, vivid imagination, or domestic anecdote, is as much woman's especial instrument as the needle.

I like Halloween. It gives you a chance to dress up like something you're not, you know? Like when the Miami Dolphins put on football uniforms.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the 'Chronicles Of Narnia ' 'The Wizard Of Oz ' 'The Phantom Tollbooth ' the 'Dungeons &amp Dragons' cartoon on Saturday morning in the '80s.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn't matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slip through into Fillory...it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

He was going to be a motherfucking Magician.