Quotes About Imagination

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.

I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

I'm trained to look for certain things... I shoot, I shoot, I shoot, and then I go find it in the ether.

I'm not a trained musician or singer, but I can turn out a song.

I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.

I think I wanted to be a dog trainer or a ballerina. It always changes when you're a kid because you think you can do a million things.

I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.

I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.

Many Americans have a romanticized view of trains, rooted in a bygone era of elaborately adorned rail cars lit by flickering gas lamps and pulled by smoke-belching steam locomotives.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

As a child, l was fascinated by gemstones in the way that small children are fascinated by dinosaurs or trains. Stones seem very physical and look like sweets. You can look at them microscopically and imagine things about them.

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.

Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill.

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

See, all actors pretend. I enjoy that pretence. I don't wear heels in real life, but if it is for a character, I love to get into the traits of the person I am playing.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.