Ernest Dimnet Quotes

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.

There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.

It is no use describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself.

Songs are about whatever you want them to be about. For me it might mean something completely different than what it means to you. So I'd say it's about whatever the listener thinks it's about.

I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

The same evidence that is convincing to one person may not convince another.

We all look at the same object in different ways.