Literary Imagination Quotes

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full.

Ideas can come while reading a good novel.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

I've always loved 'Alice,' and I've always loved Lewis Carroll. I love his kind of tone and his intelligence.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.

Poets tell many lies.

Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer.

… fiction may be admitted to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to offer that is entitled to credit

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Amanda Ashley is a master storyteller.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

I think a lot of things are written from experience, but then you become a writer and talk about other people's experience and you tell stories. I mean, you can't just tell your own story all the time.