Quotes About Imagination

as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly . . . it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

Artists, by nature, are gamblers. Gambling is a dangerous habit. But whenever you make art, you're always gambling.

And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

nature, in her limitlessness, has no concern for the boundaries of our mortal imaginations.

It has been so hard for me to imagine living a life without him in it. Even just to imagine that there will never be another road trip with my favourite travelling companion.

I realized as a songwriter that all I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that's what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one. The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.

Creativity is a gift to the creator not just a gift to the audience.

He didn't so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one.

Perhaps creativity's greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are.

Perhaps creativity's greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration.

Anyway, I quite liked the way he lived inside my imagination as a massive and powerful presence, built out of his poems and the stories I'd heard about him. So I decided to know him only that way—through my imagination. And that's where he remains for me to this day: still alive inside me, completely internalized, almost as though I dreamed him up.

Las ideas son una forma de vida incorpórea, energética.

stubbornness helps when it comes to the business of creative

The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don't live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion—and even total frivolousness.

You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others -- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion...All I ever wanted was to know *this* world.

He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out "like little origami things, or paper airplanes.

But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn't actually that big a deal. He told me, "I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds." Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That's all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life. The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.

Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

Pero si pudiera hacerme unos pantalones con la hierba de este jardín lo haría