“I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.”

Quoted in interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965)
Context: You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 8, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live." by William S. Burroughs?
William S. Burroughs photo
William S. Burroughs 110
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, a… 1914–1997

Related quotes

Adonis Georgiadis photo
Helen Keller photo

“The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Five-sensed World (1910)

Virginia Woolf photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“The real world is much smaller than the imaginary”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in ‘Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Munich Round Up, 100 (1968), with translation by Dan O’Hara http://www.ballardian.com/munich-round-up-interview-with-jg-ballard
Context: I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

Cees Nooteboom photo
Brandon Sanderson photo

“… imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people's lives.”

Lightsong the Bold
Warbreaker (2009)

“A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 181
Context: The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent.... The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem.
These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form.
A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.

Hermann Hesse photo
Daniel Tosh photo

“Even when I was a kid, my imaginary friend would play with the kid across the street. I'd be like, "Hey, so I guess I'll see you later," and he's, like, "Whatever, queer."”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

That's a hate crime!
Comedy Central Presents: Daniel Tosh (2003)

Related topics