Quotes About Imagination

There will always be those who feel more comfortable not venturing from the warmth of the hearth, but there are those who prefer to look out the window and wonder what is beyond the horizon.

When reality looks too ugly, fantasize.

It's not the books by Stephen King that I read, I need protection from the things in my head . . .

We were playing a story game Bucky had invented called the Last Supper. It consisted of allowing those evil, avenging creatures of God—horseflies—to light on the exposed skin of your arm or leg and take a bite. At that point, you make up an epitaph, which you deliver to the horsefly as he eats his last meal, and then you flatten the little bastard. The speeches are voted on by those in attendance, and the best speech wins a bottle of wine.

But she did have to do something creative, even if it was just some little thing, because she was not writing, and not writing is hard work, almost as hard as writing.

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself…there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone. Where we don't have to ask how it feels, because we feel it for ourselves.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

Every abyss is navigable by little paper boats.

If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...

I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Ten watercolors were made from that star.

He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

You're a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.