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

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

When schools flourish, all flourishes.

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

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

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.

I feel like whatever you’ve done in your career, good or bad, it’s nothing but preparation for the big events to come.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations – if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that.

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.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

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.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

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

If you can build a business up big enough, it’s respectable.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

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

Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.

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

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.

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.

I’ve been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I’m getting really tired of Disneyland.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

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.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

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

Every wall is a door.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

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.

Change in all things is sweet.

I grew up where, when a door closed, a window didn’t open. The only thing I had was cracks. I’d do everything to get through those cracks – scratch, claw, bite, push, bleed. Now the opportunity is here. The door is wide open, and it’s as big as a garage.

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.

We’re running the company to serve more people.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

There is no education like adversity.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

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.

With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It’s made up of pioneers, the beginners. That’s where the action is.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.