I do rely on my instincts a lot and my imagination.
As a boy, the very words ‘Liberty Bell’ and ‘Independence Hall’ fired my imagination and made a profound and lasting impression on my mind. Throughout my struggle to secure national freedom for China, I have continuously dreamed of the day when she would assume the full stature of an independent, democratic nation.
Make sure you visualize what you really want, not what someone else wants for you.
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they’re casting, they’re dressing the scene, they’re working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they’re also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
We can live with lots of things, but we can’t live without imagination, we can’t live without hope.
Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.
My books are inert as cordwood till a reader’s imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
On the sets of the movie ‘Manto,’ I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one’s collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Essentially, I’m untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I’m going to be playing.
The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience – anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they’re going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing – in perception – have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.
I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It’s just a characteristic.
I certainly know there are people in positions of power in the business who lack imagination and, perhaps as a result of that, think of me as ‘David’. But I wouldn’t really want to work with those people, you know?
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know. There’s no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.
A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
You experience the films through the actors, so they’re all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.
Synthesizers can be programmed with more imagination than a real, ‘human’ performance. It’s a joyful thing.
‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
I’m not a perfect human being by any stretch of the imagination. But there is always this little voice inside of me that keeps me where I know I need to be.
Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
When you’re starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that’s gone before and the stuff that’s influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that’s where you start from.
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
The human race is governed by its imagination.
I don’t like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it’s your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.
The capacity you’re thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
I’m kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.
In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I’ve ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.
As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
Certainly I was a very religious child, a deeply weird and very emotional child, an only child with lots of imaginary friends and a very active imagination. I loved Sunday school and Bible camp and all that. I had my own white Bible with Jesus’ words printed in red in the text; I even spoke at youth revivals.
There are no shortcuts in life – only those we imagine.
There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
The aspect of kind of living in your imagination and creating a more romantic vision of the world than the reality that you’re given – that’s definitely something I can sort of relate to.
Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
I hope my kids see imagination has power to change everything.
If you don’t pay attention and if your imagination isn’t pretty much engaged, you’re going to miss things and you’re going to miss opportunities for it to be as compelling and as creepy as it can be.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
I’m not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.
My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.
It’s a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don’t have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.
Imagination is as good as many voyages – and how much cheaper!
