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

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot.

A fear of using the imagination is very deep in America.

Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption and make us look up and see- with terror or with relief- that the world does not, in fact, belong to us at all.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.