Quotes About Imagination

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

As a boy, the very words 'Liberty Bell' and 'Independence Hall' fired my imagination and made a profound and lasting impression on my mind. Throughout my struggle to secure national freedom for China, I have continuously dreamed of the day when she would assume the full stature of an independent, democratic nation.

I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Some actors are better with words than me. I prefer to play it rather than say it - and keep people thinking.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

Words in a person's word stock are like paints on a palette. It helps to have just the right shade when you need it.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Here I sit, beneath the large window of a first-floor Georgian flat, exploring the corridors of my sordid imagination for comedic words of beauty.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.

I remember travelling up and down the road, and I kept journals during my whole career, and I was always making notes about things I wanted to say, words I wanted to create, actions I wanted to do, things I wanted to do to make the character more imaginative and fantastical.

Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

Play is the work of childhood.

Learning a musical instrument is challenging, it demands fine motor skills and coordination. It develops children's listening, thinking skills, imagination and perseverance. It brings out the very best in the children as they work collaboratively with their peers and teachers.