Quotes About Imagination

So it wasn't actually that bad, it took a couple of weeks to sort of get used to uh, you know, standing around and pretending to have ice shoot out of your hand, but once you got used to that it uh, it was actually not that hard.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'

I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.

I get a million ideas a day and I don't put too much weight on any one of them. The ones that really stick in my head are the ones I end up doing.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a civil engineer. No joke. I would come home from school and build bridges out of toothpicks and see how much weight they would hold before falling.

I'm thankful for weird people out there 'cause they're some of the most creative people.

It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

Most fears are basic: fear of the dark, fear of going down in the basement, fear of weird sounds, fear that somebody is waiting for you in your closet. Those kinds of things stay with you no matter what age.

Songwriting's a weird game.

I've always made weird sounds with my mouth. I've always been fascinated by the sound design, what you can do with your mouth. I was the kid dancing around in third grade on the basketball court. While everyone would be playing sports, I would be jumping around.

I try to take normal things - whether it's a serious subject or something as obscure as a piece of toast - and put a very weird twist on them.

I made some games, but I'm pretending like I didn't because they all turned out weird.

I would often draw in my sleep. That alone made for twice the work... I couldn't use the weird stuff I drew while dozing off, so I'd end up having to draw it all over again.

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

I'm someone who just likes being in my cave and thinking up weird stuff.

I think movies are good for getting into dream states or exploring weird alternate states of thinking.

The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law - an imaginative escape from palling reality - hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes.'

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, 'OK, this is what I'm going to do for a living and I'm going to be Weird Al.'

If you go to my house, it's not like I'm 5, but I definitely have a lot of toys and weird, tiny miniatures.