Quotes About Imagination

Indeed, Clausewitz was wary of the general who tried to be too smart. He preferred those who kept their imaginations in check and a firm grip on the harsh realities of battle.

Clausewitz was wary of the general who tried to be too smart. He preferred those who kept their imaginations in check and a firm grip on the harsh realities of battle.

Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.

Every once in a while I don't think it's a bad idea for lawyers to remember that what goes on, at least on some level of our brains, is that we have to imagine everything coming apart. ... It's what we are. Out of control, always prepared, Boy Scout control freaks.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. –

Assume full responsibility for the dream. For "through the dream the man makes the matter his own; it is in his will, and he is responsible for it."19

But for ten minutes I'd been transported somewhere else. Andy's room. A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.

I have just bought into the delusion that these toys are real. And now I'm believing that this one toy, Buzz Lightyear, is himself delusional for not realizing he is just a toy. This was insane.

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

She had not eaten supper and remembered the chicken and salad and wondered where Ervin was and imagined him in a nice restaurant, being pleasant with the waitress in a very low-key way, letting on nothing, a felon in flight, a murderer of possibilities, a their of happiness, a man guilty of so much, yet never standing trial for anything.

Then it's not the past I yearn for, but the idea of a time when everything important has not yet happened: — Lawrence Raab, from section 5 of "The Uses of Nostalgia," What We Don't Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993)

what he [the science fiction writer) wishes to capture on paper is different from writers in other fields.... There is no actual boyhood world once extant but now only a moment, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds... . PHILIP K. DICK, 1980

Philip K. Dick is a master of the speculative imagination-the type of imagination that includes but goes beyond psychological, political, and moral explorations to challenge the very cognitive constructs by which we order our lives.

In the case of the SF genre, the basic rule was, is, and always has been: Come up with a startling idea and set it loose in astonishing ways in a future world.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

They can see everything they want to, but never forget that they cannot see beyond the distortion of their imagination where there is no color and everything exists in black and white. And that is why we will survive, because they do not have what is necessary to defeat us. The real war is between our imagination and theirs, what we can see and what they are blinded to. Do not despair. None of them can see far enough, and so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive.

But I remember a scene where someone sneaks out into the woods to meet someone. ... And that's where it came from. Everything else is there to turn it from an image into a story. ... That image was strong enough for me to never give up on it, no matter what my editors and agents thought.

He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.

The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their vision.

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher.

I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.