To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. – Wallace Stevens
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. – Wallace Stevens
How full of trifles everything is! It is only ones thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture. – Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. – Wallace Stevens
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: theyre casting, theyre dressing the scene, theyre working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and theyre also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. – John le Carre