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

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.

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.

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.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‚Where’s the self-help section?‘ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

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

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

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.

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.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

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

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

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

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.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

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.

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.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

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

You have to dream intentionally. 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’m lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, ‚Free at last,‘ and she says ‚You’re free all right, you’re free to do the dishes.‘ So I say, ‚You’re talking to the former president, baby,‘ and she said, ‚consider this your new domestic policy agenda.‘

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

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.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

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

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.

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

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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

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.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

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

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.

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

Eventually you won’t think of ‚the Internet business.‘ You’ll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn’t clear.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

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.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

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

I never played with anything like toys.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

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

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

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

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

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.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

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.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.

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