Imagination and writing quotes:

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I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out. -- Richard Paul Evans
With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from. -- Terrence McNally
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood. -- Jack Prelutsky
The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone. -- Lisa Unger
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
Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen. -- Michelle Paver
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. -- Janet Frame
Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal! -- Robert Creeley
I was a shy child, and when I was 13, I started wearing braces on my teeth. I used to be acutely self-conscious, and I think writing was a way of withdrawing into my own imagination. -- Samantha Shannon
I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving. -- Miriam Toews
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
The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for. -- Christopher Paolini
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
The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine. -- Joyce Carol Oates
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way. -- Sue Monk Kidd
I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else. -- Dawn French
Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream. -- Sara Sheridan
It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college. -- Sara Zarr
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others. -- Amy Waldman
I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination. -- Anna Deavere Smith
Writing opens the door to imagination. -- Joe Evener
I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals. -- Mary Pope Osborne
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. -- Ishmael Reed
Writing is the light of imagination playing over shadow of thoughts. -- Khaled Talib
The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote. -- Julia Alvarez
Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know -- John Gardner
Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision. -- Eloisa James
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination? -- Ian Mcewan
Without imagination, writing is a stack of lumber, a sack of nails, and a locked tool shed. -- Michael J. Kannengieser
Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing. -- Anne Waldman
'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder. -- Nathan Fillion
Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder. -- Nathan Fillion
For as long as I can remember, I've always had a wild imagination and always enjoyed reading and writing. --
Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time. -- Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. -- Pat Conroy
One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self. -- Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality. -- Pieter Geyl
Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people. -- Ayana Mathis
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
To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism. -- Julia Glass
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
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
I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination. -- Vikas Swarup
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
Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination. -- Maurice Sendak
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
I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent. -- Thomas Jefferson

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