Top 100 Quotes About Writing And Imagination
#1. I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.
PJ Harvey
#2. People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.
Lionel Suggs
#3. One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
Leo Tolstoy
#4. I think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this
I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it slyness when it is only self-defense.
L.M. Montgomery
#5. It's in my head now. It's a memory. No camera could have captured what I saw and felt.
S.A. Tawks
#6. We're not talking about your life. We're talking about your writing. Your imagination. Your creativity. And it's time you learned there's a big difference between your writing and your life. To do it right, your writing takes an incredible amount of work. Your life takes more.
Jennifer Echols
#7. Ms Rainn, you might say, is a writing prodigy and I'm her mentor.
S.A. Tawks
#8. Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.
Jeff Zentner
#9. 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
#10. I think, use my imagination, and write; therefore, I am.
Every day I'm writing, I'm living. Every other day is just waiting.
Michael Berish
#11. We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.
S.A. Tawks
#12. Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.
William Faulkner
#13. I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living.
F.K. Preston
#14. The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
#15. The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
Stephen King
#16. Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it.
S.A. Tawks
#17. I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
Tiffany Madison
#18. Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream.
Sara Sheridan
#20. Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.
Clive Barker
#21. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them into shapes, and give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare
#22. You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
Leonard Bernstein
#23. A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W. Somerset Maugham
#24. One shot is all anyone needs if they back themselves and do it right.
S.A. Tawks
#25. I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
Miriam Toews
#26. When you imagine and clearly articulate your goals in writing, you access the creative energy of your right brain. Imagination and creativity allow you to find solutions to problems that were not previously available to you and give your left brain an opportunity to be receptive to new ideas.
Julie Connor
#27. You can't lose sleep over should-of's and could-of's.
S.A. Tawks
#28. The moment of writing is not an escape ... it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
Larry Levis
#29. Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.
Tim Ingold
#30. Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
Jack Prelutsky
#31. If you work hard all day and all night, something may come of it. You never know, it just might.
S.A. Tawks
#32. Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
Katherine Anne Porter
#33. The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.
S.A. Tawks
#34. It is that kind of thinking that is the problem; that movies, video games and the Internet, devices that simply amuse the imagination are more interesting than what a library stocks.
S.A. Tawks
#35. Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray.
S.A. Tawks
#36. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.
Azar Nafisi
#37. I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
John Irving
#38. Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.
Christina Westover
#39. Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.
S.A. Tawks
#40. 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
#41. The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
Christopher Paolini
#42. A writer's role was never just to tell stories, but to create a world to encompass and share with others.
Solange Nicole
#43. What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience in the narrow circle of sedentary life.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#44. I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.
Eric Diehl
#45. Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.
A.S. Neill
#46. All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#47. The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Paul Theroux
#48. I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.
Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero
#49. It was nice meeting you three, and I'm sure under different circumstances it would have been a pleasure.
S.A. Tawks
#50. The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
Susan Vreeland
#51. Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Robert Hass
#52. Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.
Ayana Mathis
#53. English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor.
Storm Princeholm
#54. Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
George Bernard Shaw
#55. Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums ... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
John Green
#56. Imagination Is the 1st step to writing the sequel to your life. Dare to believe and you're sure to receive.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#57. If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.
S.A. Tawks
#58. Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H Gass
#59. Mistress Creation keeps calling my name ... i long for her, and she, for me ... we will be reunited soon. In the interim, i bide my time dreaming of her, writing about her and stretching her across the vast landscape of my imagination. "Soon", i whisper to her, "Soon
Jaeda DeWalt
#60. We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.
Alan Brennert
#61. Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands.
The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.
Mark Bell
#62. What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.
R.M. Engelhardt
#63. Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.
S.A. Tawks
#64. Through her eyes the day was new and anything was possible.
S.A. Tawks
#65. Without imagination, writing is a stack of lumber, a sack of nails, and a locked tool shed.
Michael J. Kannengieser
#66. Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!
Robert Creeley
#67. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#68. Imagination is the real magic that exists in this world. Look inwards, to see outwards. And capture it in writing.
Fennel Hudson
#69. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.
Carl Sagan
#70. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.
S.A. Tawks
#71. It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.
S.A. Tawks
#72. Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
Haruki Murakami
#73. We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
Sue Monk Kidd
#74. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.
Deborah Lawrenson
#75. Books are a gateway to the extraordinary, a portal for the unfettered imagination and limitless creativity.
Diana Jane Heath
#76. On writing...
"It's a walk into the darkest corners of my imagination where my nightmares fester until something living and breathing escapes onto the screen of my laptop." JET
J.E. Taylor
#77. It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.
Cirilo F. Bautista
#78. This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
#79. Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.
Gertrude Atherton
#80. It's 90% imagination and 10% real experiences.
Darynda Jones
#81. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
Danielle M. Maistry
#82. 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
#83. They're a group called The Spirit-crushers and their leader is known as The Almighty Spirit-crusher.
S.A. Tawks
#84. I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
Ellen Glasgow
#86. You've got to try and not let it keep you down. Sure, let it hurt but don't let it harm you.
S.A. Tawks
#87. Fiction is a great combination between experience and imagination.
Desi Puspitasari
#88. My main objective in writing is to open the minds of my readers, to say 'the world can be a wonderful place - its possibilities are open to you and your imagination'.
Gary Crew
#89. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.
David Foster Wallace
#90. I love that I live a creative life. It is in the work that I do - acting, writing, and directing. It's also in the mindfulness of every part of my life, from a meal that I prepare for family and friends to putting my imagination to work in a garden.
Regina Taylor
#91. I believe the uncertain times are almost upon us, and they are much more uncertain than I imagined.
S.A. Tawks
#92. 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
#93. Embrace what works and discard what doesn't.
S.A. Tawks
#94. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#95. My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
Barbara Corcoran
#96. Both reading and writing are experiences
lifelong
in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
Eudora Welty
#97. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#98. 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
#99. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#100. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.
Jodi Picoult
