Quotes About Imagination

Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls.

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

I used to cut guitars out of a piece of cardboard to copy the Strat look. I used a backwards tennis racket for a while and graduated to the cardboard cutout.

I grew up in the 1950s at the beginning of rock n' roll, and would strum a tennis racket in front of the mirror.

Our idea of fun wasn't going to Disney World. It was, you want to play basketball, go outside, and make a goal. You want to play baseball? Take the old broom, take the handle off, take a tennis ball that we found somewhere, and go play baseball. We were forced to create things.

The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.

Have I ever pretended to be something? I think back in college I think I might have told a girl that I was a professional tennis player once. And then, of course, she had never heard of me so I had to dig deeper. 'I'm just sort of on the playing satellites. You know, I'm kind of working my way up. I'm not ranked in the top 100 or anything.'

I have a million funny ideas for sketches, but I don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars shooting them.

If every song is in the past tense, that's a drag, so you have to predict the future.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Alfred Hitchcock had to find ways to create tension without showing it, but now with computer-generated effects you can show anything.

As a kid, I used to take the sheet off of my mother's bed, make a tent and put on a show for the neighborhood kids and charge them two packs of matches. Then, the show got so good I started charging a penny.

For a while we lived in a tent we'd pitched inside his parents' house and we slept on pillows.

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

I usually talk about clothes in terms of a story rather than a colour.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

I equate composing with orchestrating. I think my music in terms of an orchestra.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.