Quotes About Imagination

Beautiful… as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare.

Poetry should be made by all and not by one.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

Genghis nodded drunkenly. "Writing," he replied, scornfully. "It traps words." "It makes them real, lord. It makes them last.

He had just brought Richelieu back down to the ground after a frolicsome attempt to touch a cloud with his front hooves.

If I don't write it, they can't buy it.

If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we'd see the beauty then and stand staring in awe.

Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, through many doors to the one door of all.

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.

while daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill.

That's why I like fast film. It gives you more freedom to light more naturally.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

It was 100 feet of 16 mm black-and-white film of a car coming to a stop sign, and driving off. I had to decide how to frame and light it. It was magic. There was a sense of mystery.

Human beings are caught in a unique and unavoidable dilemma: on one hand, we have astounding powers of perception, memory, analysis, imagination - and we know it. We each feel our own uniqueness and grandeur; we should be gods. But we can't help noticing that our remarkable powers are attached to a dying animal. (summarizing Becker's writings)

There's a vastness here and I believe that the people who are born here breathe that vastness into their soul. They dream big dreams and think big thoughts, because there is nothing to hem them in.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.