Quotes About Imagination

With Yale, my world got so big all of a sudden. At school, if you could dream it, someone would make it so that you could do it. It was magical. I had a lot going on, as you do when you're 17, and didn't necessarily capitalize on all of it, but it made me see possibility in a way that I hadn't before.

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.

Well, the thing that I realized - I had this very happy, rosy memory of Yale. And I had even described it in the past as my Hogwarts.

Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.

I've always been a daydreamer. When the other kids were playing, I was listening to the roar at Yankee Stadium - I was always attracted to the roar of the crowd.

When I was 15 years old, I used to actually dream I was pitching in Yankee Stadium. Bill Dickey was my catcher.

When I was growing up, the first thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. That lasted till I was about ten. Then I wanted to be a baseball player. Preferably shortstop for the New York Yankees.

To stay sane, I lived in my head, where I could travel and imagine. In my mind, I played a championship game with the Knicks. I won Wimbledon five times. If the Yankees needed a home run, I came to bat.

We actually say in 'Nightbreed,' 'God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.' There's a lovely sense in which there's a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

When I was a kid, I would make these incredibly bloody movies in my back yard. I was constantly making weird blood concoctions; Jell-O and milk was a good one. I was constantly ruining clothes and staining my parents' walls and stuff.

My dream is to have a creativity barn, in my back yard, which is full of musical instruments and every kind of paint and oils and paper, and you can just go in and make something.

You grow up dreaming about playing in the World Series since you're a little kid. I remember the days in the back yard with my parents playing whiffle ball, saying, 'Hey, it's Game 7 of the World Series, are you gonna win or are you gonna lose?'

You know, when I was a young boy I used to play baseball in my back yard or in the street with my brothers or the neighborhood kids. We used broken bats and plastic golf balls and played for hours and hours.

By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.

Actors, to a certain extent, never grow up, you see. It's an extension of being out in the back yard with a stick, only you're being paid to do it. It's borderline madness.

There was a lot of playing by myself, wearing last year's Halloween costume and wandering around the yard talking to myself - which may account for my fondness for doing different voices.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease - I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.

When I picture England, I picture little gardens and beautiful yards. I don't really like cities; I like to go and see things like that.

Anyway, so what he did was, he spread sheets for 100 yards and underneath them he'd put things so there were bumps and different levels and on top he'd put little bushes and if you didn't look to close, it looked like snow!

I wanted to own a junk yard as a child, you know. I used to smash cars and think, 'Oh, my God, there's been an accident.' My mother would take me to junk yards, and I look back on that and I think, 'Wow, that was really loving.'

As a kid I did enjoy building things; learned quickly how to make gun powder. I built sleighs, forts, houses in the back yards of houses.

I must have been six or seven - standing in front of a full-length mirror with a yardstick, pretending to be John Lennon. In my head, I was always going to be a singer, and The Beatles were probably the first musicians that had a major impact.