And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising."[The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest, May/June 2009)]

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

My friends, a vicarious obsession with celebrities and a few dearly held political opinions is not a useful life of the imagination; that's the life of a beetle that just happens to have opposable thumbs and the ability to count to ten.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed invyou are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one–probably a child–who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.