Quotes About Imagination

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

Her petticoat had stripes of broad red and blue and looked as though it had been made out of a stage-curtain. I would have paid a lot for a front seat, but there was no performance.

If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!

Always and Everywhere a Book Is Waiting for Me

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.

My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

Im probably in sky, flying with the fishes.. or maybe in ocean, swimming with the pigeons.

Writers help summon people to a vision of human betterment...They create an awareness not just to things as they are, but as they ought to be." ~ Norman Cousins

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one's own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another's. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.

My dad knows how to tell a story. He'd make me laugh by doing all the different voices.

If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

It's good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

He has us draw a floor plan of the first place we ever remember living. 'The rooms, the closets, the hallway,' he says as he draws one himself on the blackboard. He turns back to us and says, 'Now add the significant details: the couch, the bourbon bottle, the slot between the wall and the fridge.' He laughs. 'You see? I've already told you my whole childhood in three details.' He jogs to the left and writes in block letters: NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.

Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That's what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it's contagious because while you're reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.

talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.

Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad, and perhaps you would have been right, but Helen's book made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew.

How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.