Quotes About Imagination

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror--indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.

Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.

It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now--but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

Writin' songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along.

I think you have to get better, as you get older. Or, your perspective gets better, even if the work doesn't seem any better. When I was writing songs when I was 17, I was trying to write from a more experienced point of view. As you get older, you're not writing from an imagined point of view. You guess less.

Every afternoon, I was in the pasture with cattle or fishing and shooting my BB gun. That kind of freedom allows imagination to develop.

I don't know where creativity comes from, but I think everybody has the ability to be creative. I think what's important about creativity starts when you're very young and how we're allowed to experience our imagination. The people who bring us up and teach us are fundamental in either encouraging creativity or discouraging creativity. My imagination was always encouraged.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies -- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

The most direct and enduring way to reach the mind and imagination of the learner is through the mind, imagination and character of the outstanding teacher.

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

Every child is at some point a small Perseus, and this infatuation with the dark and the lonely is for most people an acute condition, best caught early in life like mumps, and which seldom recurs.

If you put junk in, you're going to get junk out; but if you find inspiration, you're going to come up with things that you would never think of otherwise. Your lungs breathe even when you don't think about it. Your heart pumps without your help. Your brain is working on ideas and solutions even when you don't realize it.

Kendini varolan? yenilemekle, betimlemekle ve yeniden üretmekle s?n?rlamamak, aksine henüz olmam?? olan? icat etmeyi ya da düÅŸlemeyi bilmek…

Tellby toech tarra Tellby toech tarra inna nip inna nip tarra toech tellby

There is nothing in the universe about which art cannot be created.

I find that as soon as I put words and ideas onto paper in my notebook, or type them into my computer, they begin to gather to themselves more images, more words and ideas. As I write I have the sensation of being at the center of a small vortex of enlarging connections, as in the poem above, and my pen or my fingers on the keyboard move faster and faster to keep pace with them.

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.