Edward Gorey Quotes

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

The nice thing about 'Arrow' is we never say never on the show. Hopefully the show will have a nice long life, and all manner of things can potentially happen.

Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

On the other hand, pot opens windows and doors that you may not be able to get through any other way.

There are infinite possibilities.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.

I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.

Possibility is far more frightening than impossibility.

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

You may not like my burglar, but please don't damage him.

The unthinkable is thinkable. No: likely.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

I just tell you what a pleasure it is to get back to the kind of filmmaking I used to be allowed to do.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

The way that I make films is that I sit down and I think, "How much money could I get with less consequences?" And that's how I start. I'd rather have less money and total autonomy than more money and start having to answer to things, because then I'm not being true and the money men are not being true.

What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.