Quotes About Imagination

There are three shelves with about forty books on each shelf. As I look through them, I am hoping for something that will take me away from here.

the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.

Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941)

The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Hope is in some respects a thing more brilliant, more vivifying, than fruition. What we have looked forward to with eager and earnest aspiration is never in all respects equal to the picture we had formed of it. The very uncertainty enhances the enjoyment.

When I'm an audience member I do not want to go and see something that I already know, I want to see something that I don't know. I want to be surprised and stimulated to think about something. I want the magic. I want to be in a situation of uncertainty; that's what excites me.

My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going.

Maybe! Maybe! Maybe if your aunt had a beard, she'd be your uncle.

The same way you can see me sit at a table in a movie and be six different people, the mother and the uncle and all these different things, when I'm in the studio, I can do that, too. I'm not trying to be a recording artist and have a certain type of music for the radio.

King Arthur was one of my heroes - I played with a trash can lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur.

'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to J. K. Rowling.

If you're not a parent, if you're an aunt or uncle or neighbor, books are an amazing gift.

By the time I was in my teens, I was reading science fiction. I had this maternal uncle who had cartons of books. It's important to read because you have to fill your head with words.

Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.

I grew up with my uncle's comic books at my grandma's house, so I've always loved my comic book reading.

It was during a drive together that I first conceived the story of a teenage girl and a friend of her father's. That was how we decided to make 'Uncle.'

It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.

Whenever the kindly uncles and aunts came over for a cup of tea and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was always the same: an 'authoress', and illustrate my own books.

I'd read the book and liked the book, but it made me really uncomfortable trying to picture myself in this part. Here's this guy who seems to be the embodiment of every single perfect guy.

The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.

We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.

I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.