Quotes About Imagination

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

We have so much difficulty imagining nothingness.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: 'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them!' This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.

There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all.

Je n'ai jamais gratté la terre ni quêté des nids, je n'ai pas herborisé ni lancé des pierres aux oiseaux. Mais les livres ont été mes oiseaux et mes nids, mes bêtes domestiques, mon étable et ma campagne.

Pour que l'événement le plus banal devienne une aventure, il faut et il suffit qu'on se mette à le raconter.

But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly.

From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.

For a consciousness to be capable of imagining…it needs to be free.

Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

How do you take something and make it special? The answer is a lot of hard work and a great deal of imagination.

When you're a story teller, you work out everything. You work out who these people are, what's going to be happening. The environment in which they live.

The work of the artist is to heal the soul.

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.

In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.