Quotes About Imagination

Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

I think escapism is something artists write about pretty frequently - it's something everyone can relate to, the concept of wanting something more, wanting to find solace, wanting to have something better.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

I used to get in trouble a lot in school because I would write very naughty stories and poems in class.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I don't write a synopsis, I don't write a treatment. I write scene by scene.

Sometimes I write about things that never happened to me that wind up happening to me. When you put things out in the universe, sometimes they wind up coming true.

I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

I don't really write with living actors in mind. I guess I write for dead actors. I'll think of like, you know, Burt Lancaster would be good in this part, and so on. With 'L.A. Confidential,' it was like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Dean Martin played the Kevin Spacey part?'

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword and I would like to have the ability to write things down and make them happen. So I guess I would like to be a screenwriter.

I could write a dozen different songs with the same three or four chords, but they'd all be entirely different.