Quotes About Imagination

Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.

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

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which.

Or was it even a dream? Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought.

Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of "sin"—this sense that it was possible to go "too far," and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969.

I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable.

A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life.

I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and "creative" in the human spirit.

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.

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

It was going to be absolutely grimmawesomely, grimmazingly snowtastic!

Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.

This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.

I could picture him gray and gaunt, looking out from an armchair, braving the worst. I knew how he'd be; I knew him. He'd be glad to see me by then, more than glad. I could feel myself wishing it were that time now.

But I think it's useful to note that at any particular point in our lives our minds are full not just of our own memories but of the experiences of characters from the books we've been reading. That's if we are lucky to have the education and leisure to read at all. And the curiosity

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.