Quotes About Imagination

Whenever I get an idea for a song, even before jotting down the notes, I can hear it in the orchestra, I can smell it in the scenery, I can see the kind of actor who will sing it, and I am aware of an audience listening to it.

The purpose of Disneyland is to make people smile.

The late, great ABC golf anchor Jim McKay once advised me, 'When you look into the camera, imagine you are talking to one person on the other end.' The next time you hear 'Hello, friends' at the start of a broadcast, just know that I'm channeling my father at that very moment. I see him on the other side of that camera, smiling right back.

My role models came in my imagination, from what I'd heard on the radio or on record... Vera Lynn I loved, but I'd only ever heard her on the radio. Gospel singers, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson. So it was in my head that I visualised the emotion but no way to see how people do it.

Our studio is in the middle of an oil refinery. There's smoke and fire around it and when you emerge from the studio you hear this hissing sound all around you.

It's quite absurd to act against a smoke creature that is not there.

I like my stationery to be funnier, like, 'Here's my note, and it's an elephant with a lady smoking a cigarette on top.'

Political correctness may make for smooth edges, but it does little for the imagination and nothing for the arts. Writers work best when they are exploring at the outer limits of what is traditional, acceptable, or conventional.

Sometimes when you look at life really closely and you realise that things are not as smooth or as kind as they should be, then you create a world outside that matches up to your expectations or matches up to your beliefs. That's the kind of world both my brother and I have created for ourselves through stage and through entertainment.

Sometimes random things that you wouldn't think mean anything mean so much to them. With kids, you can say, 'Let's go pick some flowers' or 'There's a snail. Let's investigate that.'

Whether it's a poem I'm working on or a picture I've snapped, it all has to do with the curiosity I feel without thinking about it.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.

Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I'd wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I'd sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.

My older brothers always collected comics and read them. When we were little, Robin and I would sneak into their room and take them and read them.

Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.

With 'SNL,' it's such an iconic institution. Throughout my 20s or maybe even in middle school or high school, it never felt like a real thing. It felt so distant, and I never imagined I could do that.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It's like that.

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

To be able to say, 'I'm going to be Snow White' - it's crazy. It's an honor.

The first Disney movie I saw I think was 'Snow White.' I loved all the Disney princess movies.

The very first movie that I ever saw in a theater was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.'

When I was a kid, Disney was one of my gods. I just loved movies like 'Snow White' and 'Pinocchio.'

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.