Imagination Quotes

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

~ Saul Bellow

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

~ Caroline Gordon

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

~ Philip José Farmer

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

~ Ray Bradbury

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

~ Sidney Sheldon

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

~ Anne Lamott

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

~ Ann Patchett

Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

~ Jonathan Franzen

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.

~ L.m. Montgomery

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

~ Neil Gaiman

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

~ Anne Fadiman

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.)

~ William S. Burroughs

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

~ Umberto Eco

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

~ Janet Frame

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

~ Northrop Frye

I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?

~ Kiera Woodhull

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

~ Annie Dillard

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

~ Gertrude Stein

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

~ Christina Westover

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

~ Stephen King

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

~ Wallace Stegner

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

~ Patricia Hampl

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

~ Umberto Eco

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

~ William Blake

If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it.

~ John Mayer

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

~ Alan Bennett

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve

~ W. Clement Stone

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

~ Jim Jarmusch

A child’s imaginary playmate just might actually be there.

~ Doug Dillon

Whatever you dream of, there will be fulfillment.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Imagination is the true magic carpet.

~ Norman Vincent Peale

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Never outgrow your imagination.

~ Teresa Mummert

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

~ Luther E. Vann