Stephen King Quotes

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.

It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

All the things we have to remember, and I've mentioned this before, is that we're all artists.

Now painting is different. It's something recollected in tranquility.

I think it reflects well on the state of animation that people are knowledgeable about it and love the fantasy and imagination that goes into it.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.