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

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I’ve always been a tennis fan.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

As a kid, even I knew everything about my favourite cricketers. I used to know everything possible. Now I see kids knowing about me. It feels good.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

I’ve always loved the idea of playing Black Adam.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

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.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

An honest man is always a child.

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

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

‚Border‘ was the first movie that I watched on the big screen. It always takes me back to my childhood.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

I have an immense amount of respect for acting. I’ve always loved movies and was always fascinated by movie-making. But to become an actor, I wanted to commit myself.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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.

In my day, there were no vet video games.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

Later on they send me to Hollywood. To make movies. It was all new to me. I was only 21 years old.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

When I was a child I thought I saw an angel. It had wings and kinda looked like my sister. I opened the door so some light could come into the room, and it sort of faded away. My mother said it was probably my Guardian Angel.

My movies just kind of sneak up on you. I don’t have to worry too much about what everybody is going to say. Anyway, I really don’t pay attention to what the world says about my movies. I just care about what my buddies think.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

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.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

For me the greatest source of income is still movies. Nothing – stocks, financial speculation, real estate speculation or businesses – makes more money for me than making movies.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

We can not play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

I’m not looking to get away from anything. I like what I’ve done. I like what I get to do and I enjoy working with my friends. I loved those movies, but this is incredible.

The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.