Quotes About Imagination

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.

A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.

As a kid, during the school year, my head was often buried in a textbook or Judy Blume book; the words and pictures were the perfect, barrier-free environment for me.

I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.

When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.

As a child, I envisioned a career in the hard sciences. In sixth grade, I was buying college chemistry textbooks.

When we were kids, every time you left the house with your friends you had it in the back of your head that you could go on a crazy adventure just like the characters in those movies we loved. That's hard to do if you've got your parents constantly texting you.

At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself.

To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

I find inspiration from a lot of different texts and really old stories and folk tales - things I feel like no one else is reading.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my 'friends.'

Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Music is about textures as well as melody.

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.

The people at Dylan's Candy Bar, they have to have an inner child and a sense of fun... and love the colors and the textures.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Twentysomethings thank me for their childhood... SpongeBob lives at the bottom of the sea, but he brings a lot of great stuff to the surface.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.

My mother always, always, always thought that I was going to be famous. Thought that I was going to win Oscars. In fact, I believe I accepted the Oscar as a ketchup bottle many a time in front of my mother in the kitchen. 'I'd like to thank the Academy,' I said with a ketchup bottle.