Quotes About Imagination

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

We will leap tall couplets in a single bound

All I know is that I've ruled out wearing fairy wings. When I was nine I wanted to get married in fairy wings, and now I realize that's not cool anymore.

No text without inspiration

This is where they keep the dreams about the end of the world, according to the inhabitants of places where the winters are very windy.

In winter when I put a quilt over myself its shadows on the wall seem to sway like an elephant.

Pretend that you are clever, wise, brave, calm, courageous. Pretend, and some of the time you can forget it is pretence.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

The very shape of our dreams defines us. We learn about the world and try out our thoughts and visions in them. Our dreams goad us and drive us and summon and sustain us and when we are old they comfort us. Magic is a kind of dream, and love is a dream, and hope is a dream. Without our dreams, there is no sweetness, no purpose to life.

Man is free in his imagination, but bound by his reason.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature…. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.