Quotes About Imagination

Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.

We are none of us free. We are tethered by our connections to other people, those we know as well as those we will never meet. What tethers us is our ability our responsibility to imagine them, to fathom their lives, their circumstances, what we have in common, and what sets us apart.

I have an inability to consider a thing without imagining the story behind it as a needful force, a great petitioning weight.

People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet--sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be. ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

We don't do focus groups—that is the job of the designer," said Jony. "It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design."12

Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It's a matter of discovery

A big definition of who you are as a designer, it's the way you look at the world

everyone who works on the movies is considered an artist. Everyone works together to tell stories,

Reba McEntire came through town when I lived in Texas. She had this amazing theatrical show with, like, 13 different wardrobe changes. I was eight and I was like, Wow, I wanna do that!

When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.

Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer.

Dreams are life, real life, not simply reflections. Dreams are honest.

Do you have to feel something for it to be real or mean anything? Can you touch your dreams, taste your imagination.

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.

To make this world a whole lot brighter, when I grow up I'll be a writer.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

They use the term 'ripped from the headlines' for their stories because it sounds a lot better than 'plagiarized from the New York Times because we have no imagination.

The pictures were the only items in the file that weren't complete fiction.