Quotes About Imagination

Fairies weren't always pretty mites. That was just tales people told for babies.

A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy -- human attention -- had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy -- the writer's and reader's -- across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.

I'll live in another world, then.

Stories are the way you look at the world. . . . stories are your salvation.

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better."

I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave

I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true." Napoleon Hill

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

A boy is a magical creature - you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart.

The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination...This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of - and agreement on - first principles that is characteristic of our times.

Psychology finds causes of creativity that blur the difference between a Raphael and a finger painter. Everything is in that difference, which necessarily escapes our science.

It is easy today to deny Gods creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but mans creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of Gods, exercises a strange attraction.

According to Machiavelli, love of virtue is only an imagination, a kind of perversion of desire effected by societys (i.e., others) demands on us.

Merely methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.

The points are not the point; the point is poetry.

Points are not the point. The point is poetry.

Reading was like visiting distant friends.

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? - Howl

If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.