Quotes About Imagination

What I like most: Reading well-written sources that take me to another world for hours at a time - and being able to call that 'work!' Also, of course, finding a gem of information that is either exactly what I was looking for, or else fits perfectly into the story in some way.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

Marvel Comics has always been a place where I felt at home. It has been a very important part of my life and has always been a wellspring of creative and relevant ideas.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

For me personally, I think I just enjoy movies about werewolves or vampires because it's not like an everyday thing. It's something you can really escape into.

The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.

I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base, but it seems like my staff as well as the audience, doesn't quite realize that this has happened. Don't tell them about it.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.

I think they built Hollywood on the West Coast because they were always dreaming of a New World. When they arrived here, the only way to keep dreaming was to make movies. Film was the fourth dimension.

If you stand over on the edge of the west coast of Ireland and look west, you are looking at something you can't see, only imagine. You know America is there, and you can imagine it being there. But you're also looking into infinity, because you can see nothing.

If there were a song from 'West Side Story' that I would do, it would be 'Something's Coming,' but in a sense that put it in the right key for me and then do that one.

My parents would have their friends over - their friends who thought, 'How can you live without a TV?' By the time they left, they understood why, because I had done the second act of 'West Side Story' and the first act of 'Jesus Christ Superstar,' playing all the parts. In many ways, that's what I'm still doing. I'm just getting paid better.

I was a little boy who watched 'Solid Gold' every week and wanted to be a 'Solid Gold' dancer. And I would do very in-depth reenactments of 'Grease 2' and 'West Side Story' with my sister Natalie in our garage. I was a very theatrical kid.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

The valley we lived in could easily be the setting for a fantasy novel or a prairie western novel. It could be anything.

There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.