Quotes About Imagination

Creativity isn't learning the right answers but asking the strongest questions.

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl. —T. S. ELIOT

A working imagination is research.

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Creativity is choice-making.

Stanislavski called this the "Magic if …," the daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything seems possible.

Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It's simply hypothetical.

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. Self-expression is never an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity … or lack of it.

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.

of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.

Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.

intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that's defined by the nature of the fictional reality. This line may reach inward to the soul, outward into the universe, or in both directions at once. The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges.

INVESTIGACIÓN La clave para ganar esta guerra es la investigación, dedicar tiempo y esfuerzo a adquirir conocimiento. Yo sugiero algunos métodos específicos: la investigación en nuestra memoria, la investigación de la imaginación y la investigación de los hechos. Habitualmente, toda historia necesita utilizar las tres.

live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.

Mastery of craft frees the subconscious.

Todo ocurre; todo lo imaginable ocurre. De hecho, también ocurre lo inimaginable.

a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.

In the Information Age and the age of the Internet, millions of people under the age of 30 are getting rich using their imaginations to create apps that change the world—from Facebook to Uber to Snapchat and others. Those with imaginations thrive while those without it are still looking for a job… a job that may soon be replaced by robots and technology.

Money is an idea that is more clearly seen with your mind.

We learned to make money work for us. By not getting paid for our work at the store, we were forced to use our imaginations to identify an opportunity to make money.