Quotes About Imagination

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

I remember as a kid seeing Pong in a pizza place where I grew up in Oxnard, California, and having my mind blown by it. I thought it was a TV. I thought it was just something playing on a television. But then to be able to manipulate the paddle, and the ball with the knob was, in those days, pretty huge to a little kid! It was a simpler time.

For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now

The song we're composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.

My wish for you, Kallistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you have already fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be.

I will gladly shell out $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-karat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We're struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon — I want it. Put me down for it.

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree- climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, Suppertime!

Remember, the part of us that we imagine needs healing is not the part we create from; that part is far deeper and stronger. The part we create from can't be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we've got, the better and richer that part becomes.

You're supposed to learn that things that you think are nothing, as weightless as air, are actually powerful substantial forces, as real and as solid as earth.   I understood. The eagle was telling me that dreams, visions, meditations such as this very one–things that I had till now disdained as fantasy and illusion–were as real and as solid as anything in my waking life.

When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.

A child has no trouble believing the unvelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

talent: the innate power to discover the hidden connection between two things — images, ideas, words — that no one else has ever seen before, link them, and create for the world a third, utterly unique work.

I, on the other hand, believe that the source of creativity is found on the same plane of reality as Resistance.

The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.

Remember, as artists we don't know diddly. We're winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. It's blasphemy and sacrilege. Instead let's ask ourselves like that new mother: What do I feel growing inside me? Let me bring that forth, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.

Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.

Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It's not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don't resist it.

No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they're doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they're doing it.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

she doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in anticipation of its apparition.