Quotes About Imagination

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

When I was 15 or 16 playing in groups, we used to sit in the car and try to write the lyrics down as a song was playing, and we'd assign each person a verse, you know: 'I'm going to do the first one. You go for the second one.' And then sometimes you'd wait an hour for it to come on again so you could finish it up.

I don't believe in writer's block. I'll get stuck, but being stuck, I'll still write a verse. If you know where you're going, you can always start from there and work your way back.

When you're babysitting a kid, all you're seeing is a version of them, a small dosage.

Apparently, when I was really little, I watched the film version of 'The Secret Garden' and thought it was, like, the best thing ever.

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.

'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Do you know Method Man's real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. That's kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

Some characters think more like me than others; some think more like my dad or someone else. It certainly is made up of my experiences, things I've heard, things I think are funny, things I think are sad. There's sort of a strange, blurry version of yourself in there.

I think when I start out writing, I always try to write the version of the movie that I want to go see. I don't mean it in a way that ignores the audience, but I really set out to make a movie that I want to see and that, hopefully, other people will want to go see it. So whatever's amusing to me, I guess, I throw it all in there.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of 'Peter Pan' for the school play. They didn't use it - I imagine it was unperformable - but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!