People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men so I thought I would be a writer instead.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately but write from recollection and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

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.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

It's very hard to write humor.

But it also became the experience or was the experience of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.