Quotes About Imagination

A religious war is like killing someone over who has the better imaginary friend.

even when we stop typing and leave the house, we remain writers.

We get to play God with our stories.

He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn't know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me.

One reason I've hung on to book selling is that it's progressive—the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse. No reason to name names, since no one is spared. Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energized or realized forever. Strong talents can simply exhaust their gift, and they do.

He thought living in a place where there were eagles to watch might encourage some pretty good dreams.

Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on—she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better—in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.

Ever since he was a little boy, he had always tried to make things sound better than they actually were.

Basically Jake just dreamed his way through life and somehow got by with it.

I was just doodling at the typewriter

They didn't understand that he talked of pleasant things and faraway places just to create a happy prospect that they could look forward to for a while. It wasn't meant to really happen, and yet women never seemed to grasp that; he had been in ticklish spots several times as their disappointment turned to anger.

things which seemed impossible often weren't. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over.

Everything starts as somebody's dream.

This place is a playground for a questing mind.

Did I still remember how to let my mind play?

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

Have at you, Builders! You can't keep a science-fiction writer in Hell!

When every page has been read and the book has been put down, is the story over? Some stories flow onward through the reader's imagination. Some authors leave playgrounds for the reader's mind

She's just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can't be injured.

My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams

The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle. This happens when Piranesi in his imagined prisons depicts a world peopled by other beings than those for which it was created. (On the Fantastic in Literature)

Så rusla vi hjemover. Snakka om alt vi skulle gjøre. Om The Snafus. Om hvor berømte vi skulle bli. Om sommeren, enda vinteren bare såvidt hadde begynt, om alle somrene i våre liv. Vi snakka om når vi skulle begynne på gymnaset og om når vi blei ferdige med skolen for godt. Vi blei svære i kjeften og vakre fugler fløy ut av ansiktene våre. Vi tok framtida på forskudd og den så sabla bra ut.

It's weird to live somewhere where you can't see the stars.

your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It's more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you'd never before been. Home. When you weren't sure you'd ever get to have one.