Quotes About Imagination

We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

Cinema is much more than heroes and villains.

'Dragon Ball''s villains were easy to draw: Piccolo, Freeza, Majin Boo.

I always say that when I was a kid, I only played with the Darth Vadar and Storm Trooper action figures. I gravitated toward the villains. I think it's a common thing.

Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.

I think the best collaborations in comics come from a lot of talks with the artists where you are finding out what they want to draw, what kind of villains they want to do.

When I was about ten, I was very impressed by the way Tarzan could swing through the trees from vine to vine. No one ever told me, 'Don't try this at home.'

I went down to my keyboard and was playing random chords, and the one line I kept repeating was, 'I'm a lost boy from Neverland.' I decided to post it to Vine, and it got the biggest reaction I'd ever gotten. People wanted to hear more, and I had to explain it wasn't a song.

If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.

One of the things that attracts me to vintage and antique things is they have stories, and even if I don't know the stories, I make them up.

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

In a kind of simple, stupid way, when you walk down a normal city block and you turn around the corner and there's 40 vintage cars and every storefront has been done over to look like 1941, it just kind of blows your mind. It's movie magic.

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.

I don't believe in using too much graphic violence, although I've done it. It's better to be suggestive and to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks in their minds.

The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.

When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.

As we're bombarded with the imagery that we are and now, post 9-11, it's hard not to get hardened by the world and the amount of violence that's allowed to be shown to kids these days.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

Anything that encourages a boy to open a book, in a world of more violent and therefore more compelling video games, is something I'm going to pay for.