Quotes About Imagination

Working with Terry Gilliam was magic - I've been watching his films since I was little.

Terry Gilliam is someone I'd always deeply admired. I saw his films when I was a child.

To fans of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Chilcot report should be read as a kind of Rorschach test - those experiments psychiatrists sometimes use to determine what their patients imagine they are seeing in the shapes of inkblots.

But we must be so creative, trying to simulate the game. How can I make the players, when one is there, another is over there, and another is 20 metres further away, think they are playing a football match? And how can they do tactical work and organisation? It's an interesting test.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

The best description of the Old Testament that I heard was that it starts out as mythology, then it becomes legend, then it becomes history. In the mythological period - there is a distinct mythological period in the Old Testament, where the time spans are impossible and really just imagined.

The imaginations of believers have dressed up and exaggerated the excellence of the style and matter of the New Testament generally, in the same manner, in which they have the moral instructions of Jesus.

It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.

We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.

We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral.

The use of travelling," Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale, "is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Franklin was a practical man. Practical men usually do not make revolutions; dreamers do.

Beneath our feet a fairy pathway flows, The grass still glitters in the summer breeze, The dusky wood, and distant copse appear, And that lone stream, upon whose chequer'd face We mused, when noon-rays made the pebbles gleam, Is mirror'd to the mind: though all around Be rattling hoofs and roaring wheels, the eye Is wand'ring where the heart delights to dwell.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.

Our children remind us, if we let them, that there are not only many types of dreams but many levels of dreaming, that we do not have to go to sleep in order to dream and that when we imagine something vividly we are doing far more than 'making things up': we may be punching a hole in the world, opening a path into a larger reality.

Dreams are part of our human survival kit, part of what has kept us going, and evolving on this planet. Across history most people have valued dreaming for two reasons beyond all others: because dreams enable us to see into the possible future, and because they put us in touch with sources of knowledge and wisdom beyond the ordinary mind.

In my dream, the Angel shrugged and said, "If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination." And then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand. — ERICA JONG

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

How would something the size of a Mini get out of a dinosaur's arsehole?' 'How big was a dinosaur's arsehole?' Theo asked, as he grabbed a fourth champagne and passed a second to Eve. 'Are you some kind of arsehole expert, Jay?