George Steiner Quotes

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

Fantasy, in addition to being great storytelling, moves us at some unique and profound level. It has, I think, the power of mythology, or ancient dreams we have always and forever shared. In it, we find our real world and our real selves.

The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

I think in a sense seeing how films have changed me and seeing how fiction moves me more than facts in many ways, and I think that I can talk for many people that fiction moves us more than real life, it certainly helps us to set forth on this a journey of a utopia, which can never be achieved.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

In 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me - a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko.

Any closer would unravel her mystery, the very thing which made her so truly beautiful...It was her mystery that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did not know about her... No real sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he could nurture in his imagination... No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable

I am constantly drawing inspiration from everything I see-the places I travel, the people I know and the movies I see.

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

In Donald Trump, you have someone who will bring real change to Washington, D.C. He's a bold leader. He's distinctly American. He doesn't play by the old-fashioned rules. He's going to Washington, D.C., break up the status quo, and I believe get this economy moving again and have America standing tall in the world.

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

Half of my heart's got a real good imagination, half of my heart's got you. . .Half of my hearts got a right mind to tell you that half of my heart won't do.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

I just really care about what people see. I want them to know that I'm working hard for this. The artists that I look up to like, you know, Michael, Prince, James Brown. You watch them and you understand that they're paying attention to the details of their art. And they care so much about what they're wearing, about how they're moving, about how they're making the audience feel. They're not phoning it in. They're going up there to murder anybody that performs after them or performs before them. That's what I've watched my whole life and admired.

Change means the unknown.

It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

New Yorkers are predatory about real estate. When they sense softening, they move in for the kill.

Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents' Night.

The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.