Terence McKenna Quotes

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

I think entrepreneurship is our natural state--a big adult word that probably boils down to something much more obvious like playfulness.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

No matter how sophisticated our lives may be we need to think of ourselves as creative children.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

You can think about red. You can think about pink. You can think up a horse. Oh, the THINKS you can think!

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree.

I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.

I never wanted to do Harry Potter. I thought it should have stayed as a book. There are some books that should be made into movies and some that shouldn't. Harry Potter is 70% imagination. When the movie comes out, it's going to be such a stereotype for kids. When they think of Harry Potter, they're going to think of what is portrayed on screen.

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.

All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.

What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes.' Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.