Quotes About Imagination

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.

We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.

Just because we cannot imagine our actions leading to disaster, it doesn't mean that such a disaster cannot happen.

daydreaming?

In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. ROALD DAHL

Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.

it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business--made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business-- then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.

This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

Love, even that love which is imagined, is sometimes all we have to get us through.

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Miss Maxwell, read from The Harmony Herald that one in every four children lived in China. I remember looking over the room, guessing which children they might be. I wasn't sure where China was, but suspected it was on bus route three. I recall being grateful I didn't live in China because I didn't care for Chinese food and couldn't speak the language.

For the unholy trinity of Bobs: Bloch, Heinlein, and Traurig— may I meet them on the banks of The River, where we'll board the fabulous Riverboat

As for paranoia, anyone who has the imagination to postulate all possibilities is automatically a paranoiac.

this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness

You invent it, he thought to himself. And then you maintain it until it's true.

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

What was on the other side? Donna said, He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it. He... never went through it? That's why he kicked the shit out of everything in his apartment; he never thought of going through it, he just admired the doorway and then later he couldn't see it at all and it was too late. It opened for him a few days and then it was closed and gone forever.