Quotes About Imagination

only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

Six books… my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood -- a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair blazing and you are saying, Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend.