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"In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity."
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Exlpore more Imagination quotes
"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."
"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."
"Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child's bed."
"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."
"Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere."
"Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company."
"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."
"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education."
"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."
"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."
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