Thomas Chandler Haliburton Quotes

I was always the type of drug user that I had no moderation. When I was smoking and drinking, I was full on smoking and drinking. And I am also the type of drug user where I do smoke and drink, there's no creativity in terms of my writing process. I would just stare at the paper for hours and nothing would get done.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

I can't do anything in moderation.

I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth.

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!

And, of course, I began drawing so much - wild, undisciplined pencil drawings and watercolors of knights battling and such.

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Thought maps existence; fantasy colors it.

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

Neil [Gaiman, creator of the comic Sandman, featuring the Amos-based character Delirium] believes that faeries have gone beyond cool. They've transcended cool. I just think alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries. I'm sure I'll start thinking now about all the people I know who don't believe, that I quite like. We can still go have a pint. Not the Chardonnay, though.

Now, isn't imagination a precious thing? It peoples the earth with all manner of wonders.

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination . . .

If it's not there in fashion, fantasize it.

... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Imagination is a powerful deceiver.

The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

I had a huge imagination. My granddad says I was a bit of a Walter Mitty character.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.