Quotes About Imagination

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don't know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

The day women stop reading—that's the day the novel dies!

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM, said Owen Meany. IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

DREAMS EDIT THEMSELVES; DREAMS are ruthless with details. Common sense does not dictate what remains, or is not included, in a dream. A two-minute dream can feel like forever.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

She drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was on TV appalled her.

What do you think I imagine making love to a vagina would be like? Maybe like having sex with a ballroom!

Juan Diego lived there, in the past—reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.