Quotes About Imagination

You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.

We need to imagine as well as measure.

I'm working on another Lyra book right now – it's called The Book of Dust. "It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'.

The question authors get asked more than any other is Where do you get your ideas from? And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it.

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.

think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.

The narrating voice that tells 'Middlemarch' is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.

Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.

But he might have had a bang on the head! said Joan. Poor little boy, he thinks he was a rat! Hmm, said the receptionist, and wrote rodent delusion on a pink slip of paper.

But if we get education right... it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time … - Isis lecture, 2003

Everyone's dæmon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian demons, became a dragon the size of a deer-hound.

think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner

Ovo je Fritz: beskoristan je, kao što vidiš. Posve neodgovoran. No, s druge strane, Fritz se samo igrao pripovjeda?a. Da je pravi majstor poput urara, znao bi kako svaki ?in ima svoju posljedicu. Iza svakog tik slijedi tak. Iza re?enice - Bio jednom... - mora slijediti pri?a, ina?e ?e slijediti nešto drugo, a to može biti puno opasnije od pri?e.

nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

One strange thing about stories is that you sometimes know how long they're going to be, even before you've begun thinking about them.

When you write a story you're not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you're doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.

I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that - not I am a writer, but rather I write stories. If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.