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Imaginative Writing Quotes & Sayings

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Top Imaginative Writing Quotes

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Jasper Fforde

My mind wanders terribly. I'm not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn't help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration - lots of it. — Jasper Fforde

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Ray Bradbury

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves. — Ray Bradbury

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Madison Smartt Bell

Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft. — Madison Smartt Bell

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Alan Lightman

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds. — Alan Lightman

Imaginative Writing Quotes By James A. Michener

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation. — James A. Michener

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Andrew Lazo

Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one's really gotten one's imaginative passport stamped. — Andrew Lazo

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Mike W. Barr

Knowing Chris Bennett's Writing as I do, I expected Only Superhuman to have an imaginative plot and a compelling superheroine in Emry Blair. What I hadn't expected was for the backstory to make so much sense. Usually science is the first causality of superhero stories, tossed aside with the breezy rationalization: 'Hey, it's comics!' Only Superhuman is, to my knowledge, the first hard science superhero story. And the Story is the better for it. — Mike W. Barr

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Elif Shafak

Why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next. — Elif Shafak

Imaginative Writing Quotes By MC Lars

I love writing literary stuff. My favorite writer is definitely Edgar Allan Poe - so imaginative and prolific. My second favorite writer would have to be Shakespeare - I love the emotion and human truths he touches on so beautifully. — MC Lars

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Diana Wynne Jones

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: — Diana Wynne Jones

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Yann Martel

I can't understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world. I don't care if ordinary people read or not. It's not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares. — Yann Martel

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Jasper Fforde

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more. — Jasper Fforde

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Federico Fellini

Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change. — Federico Fellini

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Marina Warner

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work ... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism. — Marina Warner

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Clark Ashton Smith

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals - and the vitals of others - which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term - not more. Physiological - and even psychological analysis - can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing. — Clark Ashton Smith

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Russell Banks

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life. — Russell Banks

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Gina Greenlee

Wandering is not limited to geography. Also an altered state of consciousness, it allows a disembodied self to drift on currents of collective awareness with minimal attachment to the physical world. This state of wander tapped imaginative faculties that opened me to a freedom of being only previously experienced through travel. — Gina Greenlee

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Margaret Mahy

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act. — Margaret Mahy

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Harold Bloom

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. — Harold Bloom

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Roland Barthes

Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes a' la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world. In the theory of literature, "projection" (of the reader into the character) no longer has any currency: yet it is the appropriate tonality of imaginative readings: reading a love story, it is scarcely adequate to say I project myself; I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with his image in the very enclosure of the book (everyone knows that such stories are read in a state of secession, of retirement, of voluptuous absence: in the toilet). — Roland Barthes

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Anthony Minghella

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world. — Anthony Minghella

Imaginative Writing Quotes By G.K. Chesterton

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul. — G.K. Chesterton

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Sara Sheridan

Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures. — Sara Sheridan

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Vivian Gornick

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. — Vivian Gornick

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Cate Marvin

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind. — Cate Marvin

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Charles Baxter

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability. — Charles Baxter

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Romesh Gunesekera

Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives. — Romesh Gunesekera

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Neil Gaiman

Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to Newcastle. For coals. — Neil Gaiman

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Nicole Sager

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy. — Nicole Sager

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Lee Smith

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Sylvia Plath

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever. — Sylvia Plath

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Dorothy L. Sayers

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

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Danielle Trussoni

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life. — Danielle Trussoni

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Kwame Dawes

With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement. — Kwame Dawes

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Nicholas Murray

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley — Nicholas Murray

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Zoe Kazan

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world. — Zoe Kazan

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Charles Dickens

My dear Copperfield," he replied. "To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence," said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, "the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great pursuit! A great pursuit! — Charles Dickens

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Sharen Song

Copywriting is a design muse, it carves a beautiful masterpiece in an imaginative way. — Sharen Song

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Gerald Vizenor

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts. — Gerald Vizenor

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Gary Burton

Without doubt, the foremost band for decades has been the One O'Clock Lab Band at the University of North Texas. Through its many incarnations and under various leaders, they have demonstrated the highest qualities of musicianship imaginable, plus a willingness to balance their big band tradition with creative exploration. Astounding ensemble work, insightful interpretations of the arrangements, imaginative writing, and above all, a loving attention to musicality ... these people play beautifully. — Gary Burton

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Elliot Perlman

[T]he best historians ... take a thorough knowledge of the evidence of their subject and combine it with a sharp intellect, the warmest understanding of people and the highest imaginative powers. — Elliot Perlman

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Sara Sheridan

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement. — Sara Sheridan

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Nelson Algren

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop ...
It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. — Nelson Algren

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Wendell Phillips

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers. — Wendell Phillips

Imaginative Writing Quotes By Brenda Ueland

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good. — Brenda Ueland