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

I sell escapism.

Lightning is something which, again, we would rather avoid.

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.

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.

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

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

And so I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.

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.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining.

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

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

People like to talk about war.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen.

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

I remember I was flying home to Los Angeles one day. I was talking to the woman next to me and the flight attendant tried to tell me I was sitting next to somebody that I should know. I didn’t recognize her but it ended up being Beyonce’s sister, Solange Knowles.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.

I have been in meetings where a head of state will say, ‚I like your tie,‘ to a man… or, ‚I like your country because the weather’s good,‘ or whatever. So for me, the pins in some ways were openers.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

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

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

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.

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.

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.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

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.

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.

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.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

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.

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

There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

‚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.‘

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.

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

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

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

I never played with anything like toys.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.