Quotes about Imagination

He has tried imagining her as a prostitute—he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters—but he can't picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original.

I don't want to be left by myself in this room. The walls are too empty, there are no pictures on them nor curtains on the little high-up window, nothing to look at and so you look at the wall, and after you do that for a time, there are pictures on it after all, and red flowers growing.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Thankfully, dreams can change. If we'd all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.

You become what you think about most of the time.

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.

Even the wildest dreams have to start somewhere. Allow yourself the time and space to let your mind wander and your imagination fly.

When the Idea, of any Pleasure strikes your Imagination... let that time be employed in making a just Computation between, the duration of the Pleasure, and that of the Repentance sure to follow it.