Sigmund Freud Quotes

Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

Maybe it's because it's connected to my childhood, or it's connected to the origins of what drove me creatively, but I feel like my life never makes more sense than when I'm in that process.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

I had a very active inner life as a kid. There's a good album or two worth of stuff that I can bring out on a rainy day if I have a loss for inspiration or whatever - even now.

One of the things I would like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed when I was a kid. So, if I'm thinking about an audience, it's usually a younger version of myself.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

When you write fiction, you're like a bird making a nest. You remember every little story ever told you. It's funny how things come back to you.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

I loved being a child. If I do have a talent, it's not so much being an artist, but it's being able to remember back to that time.

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.