Quotes About Imagination

There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

That's when I feel really excited about a painting. When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I think everything starts with an idea. No matter how crazy it is, you should always try to bring it to life.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

My parents would read those books to me as well but they used to make me starving when I was a kid because they were always eating ham sandwiches with the crusts off and drinking ginger beer.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

It's a big flash of all these things and whatever you take out of that statement's one statement, one mind, one statement, one act, one show, and all the songs are one.

I make static art, not dynamic art. That's what I do.

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

When I'm on a plane, I am the annoying person humming into my phone. Sitting there static with nothing to do, a lot of melodies come to me. So I've written a lot of songs on planes.

I walk around every day with a radio playing constantly in my head, and this radio station plays a lot of hits. But it's all my songs, so that's something to be excited about 24 hours a day.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I think every actor fantasizes about a show where you get to play several characters in one piece and not just Detective Bluestone asking what time you were at the station.

I grew up in a small mountain town in Norway, and I remember miming to the Beatles on the couch when I was about six, singing into a broomstick, but this was a country that only had one radio station. There was no music around, really.

As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.

When I was a kid in the U.S., 'Doctor Who' wasn't really on, but you would occasionally catch an episode. Different stations did marathons.

Kids can't build a marble statue at home. But I've had parents tell me that, after an exhibit, their kids immediately dug out their Lego kits and disappeared for three days.