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.

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.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

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

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.

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.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

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

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.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

When you’re around kids you can be a little kid yourself and pretend that life is magic and you don’t have to be one of those sweaty people going to work every day.

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.

Writing ‚We Are Never Getting Back Together‘ was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

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

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Imagination decides everything.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

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

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

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

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.

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.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

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

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

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

I sell escapism.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

I never played with anything like toys.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Imagination rules the world.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

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.

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.

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

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

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

From the boys‘ point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life.