Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

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.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

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 man who has no imagination has no wings.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

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

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

I never dreamt, in my dream, I’m Dalai Lama.

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

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

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

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

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

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

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

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

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

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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 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.

Classical – perhaps I should say ‚orchestral‘ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

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.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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.

If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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