Quotes About Imagination

Every time a poet is about to write, every time the open their mouth to say something, they express their inner world and tell of their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, unless they are deliberately pursuing fantasies which contrast with their beliefs, opinions, thoughts, and the point of view.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape…. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive.

tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman.

Nonetheless, his vision of high technology's enhancing and empowering the individual, as opposed to serving some large institution, was quite radical for 1939—so radical, in fact, that it wouldn't really take hold of the public's imagination for another forty years, at which point it would reemerge as the central message of the personal-computer revolution.

What have you done today that was altruistic, creative, or educational?

windows"—a brainstorm that had hit Kay one day while he was in the shower, his favorite place to think.

I grew up watching Steven Spielberg and scary movies.

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit")

A fictional character living in a nonfiction world.

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.

No amount of photography could replace the memories of a life lived, of lives observed and known, of lives elaborated in the mind and on the page.

We remember the best fiction as though experienced, and we finish the greatest works with access to the inner-lives of the mind in a way life refuses us.

Art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren't always as pretty as we'd like, or don't conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don't simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don't know.

and the onion-shaped minarets of Persepolis in the distance.

into the École, I was sure he would be excited by the idea of

The right brain is future oriented. It's where our aspirations, our dreams, our longings reside. It's where creativity is born. This is the part of your brain that doesn't care that you haven't done it before—in fact it's energized by newness and bored by routine.

He lives in kind of a different world from the rest of us. You know? The kind of world where electricity is a lot of invisible spiders. The kind of world where there's organ music that gets louder when he eats refined sugar.

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator ... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.

In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom.

Dear reader. Dear, dear reader. Here we find ourselves, you and me, engaged in a book in which someone has just exclaimed, in all seriousness, 'The sentient lobsters!' How did we end up here? Did we make some mistake along the way?

when I think of really living, living to the full — all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.