Quotes About Imagination

It's when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that's the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

You'll work hard to create characters that are compelling and unforgettable. But in the end, it's the story that matters.

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream.

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.

We wanted to sit down and conceptually work out songs.

I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.

I think creative people need to do a bit of, you know, tuning into every radio station - you just do, otherwise you don't know much about other people. You kind of have to learn a bit about yourself so you can work out how we all behave and why we do the things we do.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

I was hoping, actually, that being on the other side of the camera in a scary movie, see how it's filmed and maybe you won't be as scared next time you watch one... didn't really work out! Because I know it's fake, but I just get so into it.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.

My inspiration comes from so many things, it is hard to give credit to one. I find music of all kinds to be a great inspiration. A melody or a lyric can fire my imagination. Exercise is another. Endorphins fuel my thoughts - I tend to work out scenes and dialogue when I am exercising. Reading is also a great inspiration.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.

Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.