Quotes About Imagination

I hold visions to be wisdom, and would deny them only to ambition, which exists only by the destruction of visions of everybody else

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

Vivir sin leer es peligroso, obliga a conformarse con la vida, y uno puede sentir la tentación de correr riesgos.

The horizons toward which we can soar are within us, anxious to break free, to emerge from our imaginings, then to beckon us forward into fresh realities. We have a mission to create, for we are evolution incarnate. We are her self-awareness, her frontal lobes and fingertips. We are second generation star stuff come alive. We are parts of something 3.5 billions years old, but pubertal in cosmic time. We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind.

I read to escape...I write to help others escape... --Howard Hopkins, Author of The Chloe Files

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"

But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?

He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.

He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney - only for every wrack of it - its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future - to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past.

Forgetfulness is the catalytic germ of spontaneous creativity

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Keep the reader guessing about where events are happening, what historical period the characters live in, and whether at any given moment they are jogging, taking a steam bath, or dangling from a precipice. Try to create an absolute nothingness in which, from time to time, a phone receiver or a pair of pert breasts materializes as the protagonist forms the intention to use them.

She moved as lightly as a mote of dust gamboling in a sunbeam passing through the stained glass window of a French Gothic cathedral. Her breasts stood up proudly like twin tin soldiers. Looking at her made him feel an uncontrollable urge to vomit forth his innermost feelings, straight at her.

For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a forty-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy. ... There's only one letter's difference between "yarn" and "yawn," and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories.

The mind flies out to objects of its love And finds impenetrable forms and shapes That you can formulate when you pin down Each butterfly of thought upon your board. from "Letter to an Imaginary Brazil

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Poetry is a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.

There's a Russian proverb: To taste the ocean, all you need is one gulp.

Let me tell you, an I had the shaping of things in this world, ye should all three have been clothed in the finest silks, and ride upon milk-white horses, with pages at your side, and feed upon nothing but whipped cream and strawberries; for such a life would surely befit your looks." At

And half of the fun of nearly everything, you know, is thinking about it beforehand, or afterward.

write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can type, without reference to outlines, notes, data, books or any other aids. The object is to find out what you would like to say, what all your earlier work on the topic or project has already led you to believe.