Quotes & Sayings About Imaginary Friends

Good advice is priceless. Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Not imaginary, but practical. Not based on fear, but on possibility. Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better. Seek it out and embrace the true friends that care enough to risk sharing it. I'm not sure what takes more guts-giving it or getting it. — Seth Godin

All the literati keep
An imaginary friend. — W. H. Auden

Now here's Amy Pond, standing in the freezing ocean, holding the body of her imaginary friend, and shouting at the sea to make him better.
Yeah. If only my therapists could see me now. — James Goss

Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels. — Robin Wasserman

Semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense — Alfred Tarski

It amazes me, every single time, to see so much certainty backed by so much ignorance and neglect on what is being believed and shared. The mass wisdom of the fools can only be compared to the egotistical need of schizophrenics with many imaginary friends. — Robin Sacredfire

I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends. — Dan Brown

I might be tempted to socialize more if the conversations taking place around me were half as interesting as the dialogue going on inside my head. — Richelle E. Goodrich

When you're single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it--work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers... — Kate Bolick

I once read that people who have imaginary friends never reach out to touch them. There's some part of their brain that subconsciously knows it will break the spell. That's what it feels like with Jay. — L. H. Cosway

I've always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form. — Claire Danes

That's what's so great about my job. I get paid to do what got me in trouble in grade school space out and play with my imaginary friends. In terms of Isaac, when the time's right. — Jonathan Kellerman

The Replacements made me feel a little less scared, because they made good imaginary friends. They looked like a band that would actually be fun to be in. Some bands just lend themselves to that fantasy, like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Earth, Wind & Fire - they looked like you could just drop in and they wouldn't even notice you were hanging around for at least two albums. Jonathan Richman once said he formed a band because he was lonely. The Replacements were imaginary friends who I could practice on while I was learning to have actual friends. — Rob Sheffield

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides. — Charles Dickens

Writers - particularly storytellers like myself - write about people. That is ironic, since we actually know nothing about them. Think about it. Why does someone become a writer? Is it because they like people? Of course not. Why else would we seek out a job where we get to spend all day, every day, cooped up in our basement with no company besides paper, a pencil, and our imaginary friends? Writers hate people. If you've ever met a writer, you know that they're generally awkward, slovenly individuals who live beneath stairwells, hiss at those who pass, and forget to bathe for weeklong periods. And those are the socially competent ones. — Brandon Sanderson

The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it," I offered tentatively. "It was very convincing. — Joss Sheldon

I've gone crazy and now so have my imaginary friends. — C.S. Johnson

Here's what I think. We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seek with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then, for whatever reasons, we get it in our heads that we need to get that feeling- that intimacy- from a single someone else. We call if growing up. But really, when you take sex out of it, what we want is a companion. And we make that so damn hard to find. — David Levithan

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it. — Ben Rice

And to my dog, without whom I would not be reminded daily that I am essentially little more than a ridiculous human being who has somehow swindled somebody into paying me to write down conversations with my imaginary friends. — Jim Butcher

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can't talk to your friends; it wasn't that my friends were untrustworthy, it's just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Make peace with your fears; after all, they are only imaginary friends. — Samer Chidiac

If I could have one friend,
just one in all the world,
I know that I would not seek out
a boy or pretty girl.

The friend I'd dare to choose
to stand by me each day
would be a dragon fierce enough
to scare the world away. — Richelle E. Goodrich

She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself. — Don DeLillo

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial. — Fernando Pessoa

Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.
Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.
Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.
Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.
Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He's an old man on a factory line. You wouldn't recognise him.
Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.
And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance. — Iain Thomas

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain. — Nicholson Baker

Everybody has unattainable crushes too and imaginary friends. Some part of their mind that they talk to when they can't deal with talking to real people. — Kate Hattemer

I've learned the most from Randy Harrison. Because of his fantastic imaginary world filled with bizarre friends. He is constantly giving us good advice. — Gale Harold

When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. — Louisa May Alcott

I started to make a joke that I had an imaginary friend underneath the let-out couch named Binky. I would never talk to him; I would only use him as entertainment for other people. I knew they thought that children had imaginary friends, so I was like, "I don't really believe in imaginary friends, but I want to feel like I do." I used to make a joke, "My imaginary friend Binky says this," because I knew it would get a laugh out of them. — Keke Palmer

I was such a nerd in high school, I didn't even have imaginary friends, I had imaginary bullies. — Brian Posehn

We're all imaginary friends to one another, — Jim Butcher

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends. — Tayari Jones

She remembers the last perfect evening before everything happened, perfect even though she didn't know everything was about to change. Karaoke night. A bunch of kids from choir cheering each other on. When it was her turn, Hallelujah belted out "Total Eclipse of the Heart." She went for every melodramatic note, closing her eyes and beating her chest. She got the whole group to sing along.
She remembers Jonah taking the stage next. When he sang the opening lines to Garth Brooks's "Friends in Low Places," the room went nuts. He put on a cowboy drawl and sent the low notes reverberating through the wooden floorboards. She remembers him tipping an imaginary Stetson at her when he was done.
In a week, Hallelujah would get caught making out with Luke Willis. He would humiliate her and start spreading lies about her. She would become someone quiet and sad and resentful. But right then, performance-flushed and surrounded by friends, she couldn't stop smiling. — Kathryn Holmes

Still, when I think of early friendships, I think not of people but of books. Books were my friends, and more often than not, the characters in the books were my imaginary friends, who stepped out of the pages and walked wth me to school or sat in bed with me, talking when I was meant to be asleep. What I mean is reading was my friends. And also I mean that I learned about friendship - patience, slowness, listening, care - from reading and from reading about friendship between people. — Erin Wunker

The thought of hovering above the earth, weightless in a lilac sky, appealed to her, in the same way imaginary friends appealed to her, or talking alligators. — Sarah Addison Allen

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night. — Sunwolf

Religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic. — Richard Dawkins

Here's what I love: I love sitting at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and beginning that conversation with my imaginary friends. — Brad Meltzer

I think having imaginary friends is an amazing coping mechanism. It's pretty wonderful, and it makes a lot of sense to me. — K.A. Applegate

Everyone chatters about their imaginary friends. Some are ascribing agency, motivation, and intelligence to patterns of societal forces that are the emergent properties of distributed interactions. Others are writing - or filming - fiction. — Manu Saadia

Can you imagine Simon as a kid? His imaginary friends probably never wanted to play with him. — Paula Abdul

Your imaginary friend isn't the problem, Amanda. The problem is that you don't seem to have any real friends. — Rebecca McNutt

Only children are weird. The only children I know, including myself, are either superweird or very talented and special or a mix of the two. I think there was always a certain independence and loneliness - I had a lot of imaginary friends as a kid. — Rachel Bloom

A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with! — Christie Silvers

You know what they say about friends and enemies.' Brochan nodded wisely. 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' My smile broadened. 'Nah. I'm talking about what you call a fake friend.' I received four identical eye rolls. I made an imaginary drum roll. 'A faux, of course. — Helen Harper

On un-being in an imaginary real 'lationship:

When you relive, the past, unkind,
you cannot see - you're simply blind.
Emotions - ages take to settle,
and love is fiercer than a kettle.

And in the desert, late at night
Your friends, you get to bite
The laws - they force you to a fight
The stone to glass turns - what a sight

At times I sit, and sit, and think.
What could be better than a drink?
The answer, I think, is a link...
To just one woman - just her wink.

It hurts when it hurts,
but the aching will pass.
At some point, it deserts,
all the hearts, of bent glass. — Will Advise

Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane. — Roxane Gay

Writer's block is when your imaginary friends won't talk to you. — Mary Papas

I still have imaginary friends who I talk to in my head. — Lee Ryan

I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate. — Harlan Ellison

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be. — Alison Gopnik

I didn't have any friends. I didn't know any kids besides my cousins. I wasn't a lonely kid - I was good at being alone. I'd read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I'm perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people. — Trevor Noah

Certainly I was a very religious child, a deeply weird and very emotional child, an only child with lots of imaginary friends and a very active imagination. I loved Sunday school and Bible camp and all that. I had my own white Bible with Jesus' words printed in red in the text; I even spoke at youth revivals. — Lee Smith

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers. — R.M. ArceJaeger

Biking through New York's boroughs in 2005, I thought about some old friends, Joe and Eileen Bailey. Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them. — Charles Schumer

I had a good time that night, too," Michael said, "but I kept thinking, This is forever. This is forever. You will have this good time again and again, a million times over, until it will be like a play in which you and Laura and a few fugitive lives sit around an imaginary fire and talk and sing songs and love each other and sometimes throw imaginary brands at the eyes blinking beyond the circle of imaginary firelight. And then I thought - and this is where I sounded just like a real philosopher - And even when you admit that you know every line in the play and every song that will be sung, even when you know that this evening spent with friends is pleasant and joyful because you remember it as pleasant and joyful and wouldn't change it for the world, even when you know that anything you feel for these good friends has no more reality than a dream faithfully remembered every night for a thousand years - even then it goes on. Even then it has just begun. — Peter S. Beagle

Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work. — Sue Monk Kidd

As the years passed, it became clear that Alio was a ghost, not an imaginary friend. Imaginary friends have no borders, but ghosts often do. — S. Vest

I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I'd already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I'd tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairytale in the world. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Nodding, Parker ate. "He's an exceptional kisser."
"He really is. He ... How do you know?" When Parker just smiled, Emma's jaw dropped. "You? You and Jack? When? How?"
"I think it's disgusting," Mac muttered. "Yet another best pal moving on my imaginary ex."
"Two kisses, my first year at Yale, after we ran into each other at a party and he walked me back to the dorm. It was nice. Very nice. But as exceptional a kisser as he is, it was too much like kissing my brother. And as exceptional a kisser as I am, I believe he felt it was too much like kissing his sister. And that's how we left it. I gather that wasn't an issue for you and Jack. — Nora Roberts

When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other. — Rita Rudner

I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on. — Kate Bush

Writer's block: when your imaginary friends stop talking to you. — Anonymous

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. — William H Gass

Religion is the yeast of death cakes. It is the most awful agent on a vulnerable mind. It's the refuge of alienated and lonely people. It's what people had before television. It yokes people together into an imaginary world. It is just people talking to their imaginary friends, at length. I wouldn't mind, but some of the people are world leaders. — Dylan Moran

Been brainwashed since age 2
I only had imaginary friends
And still do
And they hate you — Mac Lethal

One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion. — Pete Hamill

I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends. — Ian Rankin

One of the advantages of having an imaginary boyfriend is that he exists only for you, therefore he can not be stolen. The disadvantage is that you can not introduce him to your friends. — Jessica Zafra

I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer.
Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination? — Ben Rice

The little girl's sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy's Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. — Simone De Beauvoir

Glamour is fueled by the dreams and imagination of mortals. Writers, artists, little boys pretending to be knights - the fey are drawn to them like moths to flame. Why do you think so many children have imaginary friends? — Julie Kagawa

Growing up as a chubby kid with a ton of imaginary friends and a Cyndi Lauper obsession, I learned about rejection early on and was constantly trying to avoid it. — Beth Ditto

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions. — Henning Mankell

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.' — Mohsin Hamid

Just as a vampire has no choice but to drink human blood, I have no choice but to kill people. My fate was already decided the moment I was born. I wasn't abused by my parents and scarred mentally. I have no ancestors that were murderers. I was raised in a very ordinary household. But whereas ordinary children play alone with imaginary friends and pets, I spent my time staring at imaginary corpse. — Otsuichi

The worse thing I have done in my life is Diary writing ... a wastage of time, wastage of papers filled with some imaginary feelings and bunch of silly activities done each day ... I cant feel any glimpse of appreciable work done by me, as whatever right I did, my Diary says " you were suppose to do it, so it was not a big deal ... huhhh ... "
I passed my last few nights in reading most of its pages ... "I laughed on the lines telling about my saddest moments and nights when I cried ... .. but I felt woeful and downhearted on the lines telling about the moments when I shared my smile with someone, when I enjoyed the moments with my friends and near and dear ones, who r far and far now, and we can't get those moments back in this busy selfish life"
So now its better in busy life to live evry day and forget it in night ... enjoy life ... save papers ... no diary writing from today ... Sorry Diary, You will Miss Me ... — Saket Assertive

Imaginary friends are like books. We're created, we're enjoyed, we're dog-eared and creased, and then we're tucked away until we're needed again. — Katherine Applegate

Every child's dream is to push a button and kill imaginary friends. — Cameron Jace

Imaginary friends often leave without warning. — Keith Donohue

Author: A person who's best friends are imaginary,and who's most exciting adventures take place on the written page. — Theodore Volgoff

Bethany." His quiet voice intruded.
Her heart turned over heavily. "This is real right?"
His face contorted as if he were in pain. "Yes, it's real."
Crazy people probably did things like this all the time. Asked their imaginary alien friends if they were real, and of course, they'd say yes. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

My imaginary friends have become my imaginary children. — Chris Colfer

I like cartoons. I like 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.' It's funny! It has things that kids wouldn't get. It's like, if you're mature, you get it. I like that and 'The Fairly OddParents.' — David Archuleta

Dear five-year-old, What the fuck is wrong with you? Normal children don't have dead imaginary friends. Normal children don't pick open every single one of their chicken pox scabs and then stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks what they are doing. Furthermore, normal children don't respond by saying, "I wanted to know what all my blood would look like." Normal children also don't watch their parents sleep from the corner of the room. Mom was really scarred by The Exorcist when she was younger, and she doesn't know how to cope with your increasingly creepy behavior. Please stop. Please, please stop. — Allie Brosh

I had imaginary friends and even they were mean to me. — Olivia Wilde

Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend. — Alison Gopnik

The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown. — Rebecca McNutt

Children need stimulation and stability. That can come from grandparents, cousins, teachers, nannies, childcare centres - as long as they engage with the children and are really fond of them. There are also times when children need to be left alone to learn to be independent and to encourage their imaginary friends. — Tony Buzan

The happiest adults are those who never buried old toys or abandoned imaginary friends. — Richelle E. Goodrich

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere
ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends
even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep. — Andre Aciman

Many of them [people who escaped religion] recounted both the terror and the relief they felt after leaving religion behind. Terror at realizing there was no longer an imaginary friend; relief that no one was looking over their shoulder any more. Several described the experience as similar to that of a child learning to go to sleep without a favorite teddy bear. Others described it as simply growing up or outgrowing the need for the imaginary friends of childhood. — Darrel Ray

But [he] had lost god, and all his family and friends were staying behind with his imaginary friend. A silly dream goes away and takes with it your whole real life. — Penn Jillette

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting
not for the first time
on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood. — Stephen King

This [oatmeal] represents your soul in its pure state. Your soul on the day you were born. You were perfect. You were happy. You were good.
Now, enter Concept Number Two: crap. Don't worry, folks. I don't use actual crap up here. Only imaginary crap. You'll have to supply the crap, using your mind. Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time
friends, co-workers, loved ones, even you kids, especially your kids!
and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'Thanks so much!' You say, 'Crap away!' You say, and here the metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal? — George Saunders

He says he'd rather be dead than leave me. According to him, we're family. I guess that makes me the psycho uncle no one wants to talk to. And he's the kid with only imaginary friends for company. 'Normal' Rockwell, here we come. (Jared) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

If your imaginary friends are at all like mine, they're better off dead. — Susan Spann