Quotes About Imagination

That's bad art, you know. Copying reality without interpreting it." "Mmm. But illusion is not art. It can be a tool for art, but there is nothing of genuine creation in it.

You'd be surprised at how clearly you can hear something in your head and not be able to reproduce it.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I'm in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn't real at all.

I looked in my mirror and saw, not myself, but every place I'd never been.

sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.

It's all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can't go there because we don't know the secret code, but it's real all the same. Before I didn't know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.

Are stories true? ... They're magic, they're not about real people walking around today. So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true.

You're not afraid of monsters, are you?" It depends on the monster, if it's a real one or not and if it's where I am.

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true.

But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he's gone out. Keep it, say Steppa. But what about when he comes home?

by her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; 'circle' sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

A veces estaría bien volver a hacerse pequeño y a veces grande, igual que Alicia.

I pray for John the Baptist and Baby Jesus to come around for a playdate with Dora and Boots.

No sabía que las cosas pudieran estar vivas a medias. Aunque tampoco sabía que los retratos tuvieran vida dentro.

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

I heard a knocking in my skull, and kept running to the door, but there was never anyone there.

Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher's decision to play down the danger or if he'd received orders from above.

After a while the first lights stand out in the sky. Trian asks, 'Are they holes, the stars?' 'Bodies of cold fire,' Artt corrects him, 'fixed in a sphere around the earth. God spins it westwards every day. That's what makes the air and the clouds move.' He cranes up, a little dizzy, imagining that giant hand flicking the globe.

It depends on the monster, if it's a real one or not and if it's where I am.

there are as many universes as there are individuals to form them through thinking.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.