Quotes About Imagination

There's a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.

Creativity doesn't "improve.

I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?

Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

The future is even more fungible than the past: We can make it up, assert it will be so, and no one can say it won't happen with any surety. Herman Melville, in talking about history, said that the past is the textbook of tyrants, while the future is the bible of the free.

After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it. No I didn't. I knew he made it up. It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth.

If you can not be a poet, be the poem.

thus animals without symbolic language may lack the ability humans have to deliberately think about the past and imagine the future.

Magicians lose the opportunity to experience a sense of wonder.

Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.

I try to help people realize their dreams by using magic to tell stories that educate, move, and inspire.

Writers possess only four tools: research, experience, empathy, and imagination. Fortunately, whole worlds can be built from them.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.

It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life forms on other planets, when under the feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life forms imaginable

The little everyday neglect of imagining other people well can add up to a lifetime of flawed, perverted vision, an expenditure of soul in a waste of emotionalism.

The castle, and all it represents, will always be with us. Once it was born, once the stone was made living, the repository of power made real, the idea could never be unmade. Even if all the castles of all the world were destroyed, in the minds of men they would be built anew; the wizard called imagination would raise high walls and towers out of ruins.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good