Date: 1911

"I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good...

— Hulme, T. E. (1883-1917)

Date: 1919

"Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste for introspection."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

Date: 1984

"That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"I suppose people--certainly imaginative writers--who consciously exploit their own obsessions do so in part because those obsessions lie like stepping-stones in front of them, and their feet are drawn towards them."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points, and more than equal to any physical rearrangement of the brain's functions."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: November 22, 1990

"One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 1999

"But fiction is not empirical truth. It is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers."

— Oatley, Keith