John Green Quotes

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

You see in others who you are.

I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be.

The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

I just enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed watching films and reading and becoming someone else. I spent a lot of time on my own when I was younger; I enjoyed my own company and still do, so it was a source of escapism.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

I guess I'm a very keen observer, and I'd like to think I have a good imagination.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament,, and embrace it with passion.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

The most important tool of my trade was a mirror.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.

When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?

My lens and my personality, it's just fluid. The art isn't just in one place.