Elinor Wylie Quotes

I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.

The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.

Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky; whereas fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will.

I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.

All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

A lot of my songs are fantasy. I can dream up all kinds of things. That's the kind of world I live in. It's very sort of flamboyant, and that's the kind of way I write. I love it

We all want to have a place where we can dream and escape anything that wraps steel bands around our imagination and creativity.

Whatever colors you have in your mind, I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.

True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.

Take a bunch of little kids to the beach and they all make art. Adults are too stupid to call it art, but it is art. They'll use their imaginations, make drama, make up characters, make pictures in the sand, they'll make up songs that no one's ever heard before. All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

There are certain things I do because I am creatively inspired and artistic.

Writers who drew, they all seemed to draw the same way. They managed to keep that childlike creativity in their line.

Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

When I was living in Mexico, I started reassessing my drawing style, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more "true" to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader's imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it's a lot faster and more fun to do.

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.