Top 100 Writing Imagination Quotes
#1. I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#2. You've got to have high expectations to achieve top results.
S.A. Tawks
#3. It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.
S.A. Tawks
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
John Darnielle
#8. Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.
W.P. Kinsella
#9. Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.
S.A. Tawks
#10. It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
Jostein Gaarder
#11. Could crushed spirit be destroyed if it encountered too much spirit?
S.A. Tawks
#12. 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
#13. Entire universes flourish in my mind. Sometimes I get lost in there.
Janey Colbourne
#14. If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.
S.A. Tawks
#15. 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
#16. A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
#17. Through her eyes the day was new and anything was possible.
S.A. Tawks
#18. 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
#19. If your imaginary friends are at all like mine, they're better off dead.
Susan Spann
#20. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Embrace what works and discard what doesn't.
S.A. Tawks
#24. 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
#25. You may not have finished today but the work you did got you closer than if you would have done nothing.
S.A. Tawks
#26. I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.
Lisa Cholodenko
#27. If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.
Robert McKee
#28. It's hard to land a devastating jab/cross/hook/uppercut combo to your reader's imagination when you're telegraphing your punches.
Don Roff
#29. 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
#30. This didn't sound good. It sounded like the optimism was escaping from him.
S.A. Tawks
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. 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
#36. I would love to be able to write a tragedy in my imagination
it would turn into a masterpiece.
Franz Grillparzer
#37. Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it.
S.A. Tawks
#38. If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.
John Irving
#39. Sometimes one's imagination can be more beautiful than the most picturesque beach.
S.A. Tawks
#40. We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.
S.A. Tawks
#41. A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
Sidney Sheldon
#42. No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.
S.A. Tawks
#43. I have travel to the places I have been because, I had a vivid imagination of the places.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#44. I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)
Robert Anton Wilson
#45. 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
#46. It's in my head now. It's a memory. No camera could have captured what I saw and felt.
S.A. Tawks
#47. The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The memory will most likely come to me when I least expect it. When I'm in the middle of something else.
S.A. Tawks
#52. 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
#53. Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
Pat Conroy
#54. What could a person like Emily do? Could she possibly satisfy both sides? Or would that only end badly?
S.A. Tawks
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
Anita Shreve
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. If you work hard all day and all night, something may come of it. You never know, it just might.
S.A. Tawks
#62. Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
Jack Prelutsky
#63. 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
#64. Without writers, stories would not be written,
Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.
Angie-Marie Delsante
#65. I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
Edna Ferber
#66. Franny Armstrong is a mother of three and a grandmother of four. Her husband supports her imagination and has the patience of a saint. She's been writing since she was a child, creating plays to act out in front of the neighborhood children.
Franny Armstrong
#67. I wish I could run into the world's arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself.
F.K. Preston
#69. Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.
Sara Sheridan
#70. She liked the way the words sounded. She imagined them floating above her in a comic-strip bubble
Kate DiCamillo
#71. The writings are built by imagination. Emotions fill the colours to them.
Sameer Khan
#72. Like Thomas Hardy with his Casterbridge, my own fictional Pennington is based on a well-known English county town, which I embellish with buildings, parks, and houses from my imagination.
Catherine George
#73. The power of fiction is a great thing. But, after all, reality is just a little more important.
S.A. Tawks
#74. Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try.
S.A. Tawks
#75. The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.
Joe Haldeman
#76. Let the letters clash forming an invisible meaning of a sunny night, freezing chimney, and silent screams. When words betray you, hold on to your imagination.
Mona Naqi
#77. What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so.
S.A. Tawks
#78. To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.
Cate Marvin
#79. If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.
Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien
#80. Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.
Sara Sheridan
#81. Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany
#82. I don't really think of time off as writing blocks. I think that's a western notion of demonizing inactivity. When your imagination decides it needs to take a nap. maybe that's what it needs to do.
Elliott Smith
#83. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie ...
Mary Shelley
#84. Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
Ishmael Reed
#85. Birds are everywhere in our literature, a part, it seems, of our collective poetic imagination. If writing a beautiful line of poetry fills a poet's heart with joy, imagine how that same poet's soul must take flight at the sight of swallows soaring through the evening sky!
Lynn Thomson
#86. The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#87. The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.
Meg Rosoff
#88. Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.
Charles Colson
#89. My Irish Catholic mother loved romantic movies, provided they ended with a kiss before the screen went dark. If things went any further than that, she'd complain, Why can't they leave something to the imagination? I sort of subscribe to her philosophy when it comes to writing sex.
Catherine Brady
#90. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
Ann Patchett
#91. 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
#92. Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
Bruce Sterling
#93. Writing is not necessarily in the planning but about learning the craft of letting the imagination change that plan
Mark Draycott Author
#94. And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.
S.A. Tawks
#95. Fancies are like shadows ... you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.
L.M. Montgomery
#96. Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.
Aneta Cruz
#97. In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.
Josh Malerman
#98. I don't like to be challenged in the way that often happens, where somebody writes something and then you, as an actor, are expected to really make it up in your imagination. That's not really an ideal way of working.
Hugh Dancy
#99. The sisterhood of librarians is a non-profit organisation and our goal is to keep imagination alive, not make money.
S.A. Tawks
#100. Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.
Bret Easton Ellis
