Quotes About Imagination

Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. One can learn from that, he thinks.

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.

a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream

Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the color of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.

So this morning--waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night--he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

And so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered.

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. "The Theory of Ambition," an essay: JEAN-MARIE HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.

He wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

as a writer] you take up a life in your imagination, in which you can live all the other parts of yourself that you didn't become. And you can live in all the eras; the fact that you happened to be born in a certain place, in a certain dictate - the imagination doesn't accept these limitations.

Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Metaphors are good,' he said. 'I like metaphors. Metaphors don't kill people.

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?" - "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough." - Hilary Mantel

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Rose had the sort of eyes that manage perfectly well with things close by, but entirely blur out things far away. Because of this even the brightest stars had only appeared as silvery smudges in the darkness. In all her life, Rose had never properly seen a star. Tonight there was a sky full. Rose looked up, and it was like walking into a dark room and someone switching on the universe.

Make a wish," said Indigo. Rose made a wish and then asked, "Why?" "That's what I always do. Wish on the moving ones." "Does it matter how fast they move?" "I don't think so." "Can you wish on airplanes, too?" "Oh, yes.

Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.