Quotes About Imagination

It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now. But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center. And we'd better get ready. We need to know where we'd like to go.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

You ought to dream.

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

its pretty to think so

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

Los buenos libros se parecen en que son más ciertos que si hubiesen sucedido de verdad y en que, cuando terminas de leerlos, sientes que todo te sucedió y después, que todo te pertenece: lo bueno y lo malo, el éxtasis, el remordimiento y el dolor, la gente y los lugares y cómo estaba el tiempo.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought.