Quotes About Imagination

There is a drama queen in me, as I love acting, and I used to stand in front of the mirror and act since my childhood.

I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.

As a kid, I might have been psycho, I guess, but I used to throw golf balls in the trees and try and somehow make par from them. I thought that was fun.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

I had a very happy childhood, but I still used my imagination as a leisure resort.

When I was in school with my friends and stuff, you always used to put yourself in the situation of footballers of the time and pretend to be them.

I used to love, love Steve Martin. I still do... I would get these albums, and I would just listen to them all the time. I would stand in my room and pretend that I was delivering his comedy routine... And I don't know if that planted any kind of seed, but I wasn't raised going to the theatre.

I used to think I actually was Batman.

I was deeply in love with David Soul from 'Starsky & Hutch' when I was 11 or 12. I used to borrow my mum's peach nighty and put some lipstick on and say I was going on a date with him. I made this little purse and would carry a picture of him in it and say he was my boyfriend.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

I love playing around with ideas and turning them into something useful or fun.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will.

When he first started - Jim Henson, who created Bid Bird and Oscar - he said Big Bird was just a big, goofy guy. And it was - a script came along and I said, 'I think Big Bird would be much more useful to the show if he were a child learning all the things we were teaching in the show.' And so he didn't know the alphabet, even, for instance.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

I box two to three times a week. I don't like going to the gym because it's boring. I really like boxing because you have to combine concentration and imagination. I feel like I'm actually learning something that's useful.

I've had my nose in a book my whole life. I never thought it would be useful, but it is now. What's really nice is that I don't have a photographic memory, so words get blurred, thoughts get mixed up, and they come out as something new.

Big picture, it's amazing to create characters and see them brought to life in the art. And to love that art. But I especially enjoy writing a character with heightened powers that aren't especially useful to him.

I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.