A Quote by John McGahern

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance. — © John McGahern
The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.
We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.
Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can't really have a slant; financially, you can't have a slant on the end goals.
There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.
I do a lot of biking. I need that mileage and the long-distance stuff because tennis demands it. My fitness trainer is always trying to convince me to do an Ironman. I can probably run the marathon, I can make the 112 miles on the bike, but I will never swim for 2.4 miles. I will die after 100 meters.
Anamorphic is very difficult because the distance from the lens to the person to focus is very long so you need a lot of distance from the camera to the person so that means that you need a lot of space.
Doctor Who' is the best show to write for, because of the actors and the scale of imagination that it demands.
I don't need a fantasy life as once I did. That is the life of the imagination that I had a great need for. Films were the perfect means for satisfying that need.
If you can capture a womans imagination, then you will have her. But imagination is a strange creature. It needs time and distance to function properly.
Time is finite and the demands of the imagination and also the demands of the world are infinite, so sort of brokering some kind of agreement between those things is a continual, and for me, and ever-changing challenge.
This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.
Climbing is a great game-great not in spite of the demands it makes, but because of them. Great because it will not let us give half of ourselves-it demands all of us. It demands our best.
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