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

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.

‚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.‘

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

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

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.

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

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

The human race is governed by its imagination.

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.

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

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

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

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

Few people have the imagination for reality.

But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know. There’s no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

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.

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.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

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.

My imagination is a twisted place.

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

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

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.

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.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

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

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

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

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

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

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.

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

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

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.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

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.

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.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

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.

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