Quotes About Imagination

If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.

I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.

People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.

When I want to feel especially grateful, I think about the early days dressing up as an orange for Fruit Awareness Week.

I grew up in Orange County near Disneyland.

It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.

There is no secret orchard where ideas grow. Oh my, do I wish there were.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

I used to sing classical music to the flowers in the garden and imagine they were all different parts of the orchestra. It used to really annoy the neighbours.

I can almost see the music. It comes in the form of colors - colors jump out at me, and that translates into notes. They come fully formed: the orchestration parts, not just the melodies. Even though they're not always the right ones to use, the initial idea comes like that.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

That's what keeps me going: dreaming, inventing, then hoping and dreaming some more in order to keep dreaming.

I think in order to keep America great, we have to keep America creative.

I've never been a method actress; I've never been that person that wants to imagine horrible things happening in your own life in order to exploit them for your emotional being in the movie. I'm just not good at doing that.

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'

'Ordinary Grace' freed me. I don't have to write only Cork O'Connor novels now. I'm liberated. I can write whatever I want to write.

If you really see how many live shows are going on... you can start to do things that are out of the ordinary.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

When times are tough, people want to escape to somewhere fantastic without having to pay actual escape-to-somewhere-fantastic cash. And offering a couple of hours away from the ordinary is what the movies do best.

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'

I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

With larger-than-life films, you are lifted from your mundane, ordinary life because you empathise with the hero, and people see themselves in him.