A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I sell escapism.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I could care less about the particular. I like to make music.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

I never dreamt, in my dream, I’m Dalai Lama.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

I usually write lyrics first, and then when I get home or close to any kind of instrument, I usually make a melody for those lyrics.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Imagination rules the world.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called ‚Fingers Crossed,‘ which is on SoundCloud.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

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.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.