Quotes About Imagination

escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions

The tapestry that science weaves in describing the evolution of our universe is richer and far more fascinating than any revelatory images or imaginative stories that humans have concocted. Nature comes up with surprises that far exceed those that the human imagination can generate.

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.

thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing

Sûrement la Seine était rouge ce jour-là, de nuit on voyait pas

You're not a realist, she says. You're a dreamer who doesn't believe in the dream.

The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing.

Being pool-trained, I'm used to seeing four sides and a bottom. When that clarity is removed I get nervous. I imagine things. Sharks, the slippery sides of large fish, shaggy pieces of sunken frigates, dark corroded iron, currents. I can swim along the shore, my usual stroke rolled and tipped by the waves, the ribbed sandy bottom wiggling beneath me, but eventually I get spooked by the open-ended horizon, the cloudy blue thought of that sheer drop-the continental shelf.

You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it's filled up with old stuff there ain't no way to get new stuff in. No way at all, you understand? So I don't remember any new stuff because my old bucket is all filled up with old stuff that happened way back. You understand what I'm saying here?

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.

There are only two real people in fiction – the storyteller and the listener

fiction started up, and we started burning brain cells on stories about things that didn't happen to people who didn't exist. Why? The only answer can be that humans deeply, deeply desired it.

He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn't. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn't strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn't.

Fiction comprises stories about things that never happened to people who didn't exist.

Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When

Realitatile sunt musafiri nepoftiti in lumea fanteziei.

The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.

desperate. How could fiction help? Which it had to

A dream from the past, unconnected with reality, but absolutely defining the identity of the person involved.

counterpane and the counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a head-shaped

You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it's filled up with old stuff there ain't no way to get new stuff in.

G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, "Dickens didn't write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.

But, the third conclusion, and the most confounding conclusion: You can't design a character too specifically.