J. Milton Hayes Quotes

How do you visualize something you've never seen and just imagined, through someone you love very much?

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Asking someone to describe what something sounds like is like telling a blind person to guess what I look like.

As long as they're making beloved books into movies, people are going to be like, 'That's not my mental image of them.' It takes that moment for it to click and become their mental image.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

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

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

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.

Memory demands an image.

It was the building from the drawing in my brain. And if you don’t think that’s a weird sentence, maybe you should reread it.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

In literature, you know only what you imagine