Quotes About Imagination

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

My surprises come usually once I start rolling and photographing.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.

Theater is about surprises and things that you haven't seen before on stage.

There were no surprises, because when you sell a pilot based on a pitch, no matter how great the script is, it's going to look different and feel different from what someone imagines in their head. There will always be varying degrees of disappointment or confusion.

There are going to be some real surprises in 'Fable 2.'

What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I hope I'm always surprising people, and I hope I'm always surprising myself.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer's imagination. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to anyone, and it's not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

Innovation, surprising people and creating a sense of wonder is what consumers want.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality.

Life is surreal and beautiful.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

It's surreal to know my dreams are coming true.