Quotes About Imagination

I draw badly. Photography's much easier than drawing.

I taped the autopsy photos from Marilyn Monroe's death to my lunch box in fifth grade, and I would write stories in which someone inevitably died.

It never occurred to me that there were so many wonderful photos that had been orphaned and were out there in the world, waiting to be found. Over time, I found a lot of very strange pictures of kids, and I wanted to know who they were, what their stories were. Since the photos had no context, I decided I needed to make it up.

I like when an image could be just one of several others which would create a story. That you can imagine who are those people or what would happen before, what's going to be next; I like when there's a past and a future that we can imagine when we see photos.

I love creating art, whether it's with photos, my own body, or clothes.

The computer has played a role in destroying creativity with the Photoshop. Everybody thinks they're a designer.

Sometimes I'll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I'll just remember it.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

I think you should be able to imagine things in a different way. And, you have to dedicate both your physical and mental abilities to that ambition to accomplish it.

There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

When I'm trying to find my way into a character, the voice and physicality are the first two things I do.

Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.

You can't write a character more brilliant than yourself. It's just not physically possible.

I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.

Personally, I am not so affected by my environment. What I build in the creative process is not necessarily connected to what I am physically in contact with. I am always observing everything, but it will not necessarily have a direct impact on what I do.

Being an actor, imitating to the point of inhabiting the lives of others, may simply be a way of continuing to do what I learned to do as a boy - to travel, mentally and physically.

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

It is a labor of love, but there is a lot of labor, especially when you're trying to build a big, epic world with lots of details and a kind of physics of magic that makes some sense and actually has some rules to it.