Quotes About Imagination

I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready

Nobody but a reader becomes a writer.

I read because one life isn't enough.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet.

Back at Santa Anita, a five-year-old boy, George Takei, who later became a famous actor, was fond of the searchlights. He thought they were there to help him find his way to the latrine and back—rather than to prevent him from escaping.

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

the conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors]...to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.

Ontology is more like a playground than a science.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Maybe we're just seeing a tiny corner of reality—the corner we want to see. But if somehow we could "turn" and look at what's behind us—we might see something so strange, we wouldn't understand it in a million years.

There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.

Artists paint pictures. The best artists paint pictures for children's books.

Your imagination must, to some extent, be found in a realm beyond reason because it begins with imagining a future reality: the self that you might become.

You will see at precisely what moment the writer ceases to think of his character as an instrument to be manipulated and think of him as someone with whom he has fallen in love. For it is always, must always be, a matter of love.

Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

Anything past the horizon is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but you only see the sky.

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.

I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking.

In these dreams it's always you: the boy in the sweatshirt, the boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.