Here I sit, beneath the large window of a first-floor Georgian flat, exploring the corridors of my sordid imagination for comedic words of beauty.
Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version.
Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
It is a great thing to have a big brain, a fertile imagination, grand ideals, but the man with these, bereft of a good backbone, is sure to serve no useful end.
The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.
The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk.
There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.
I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.
I know kids who say they have nothing to do and then go plop themselves down in front of the television to watch a movie or play Nintendo or Xbox. I think there is nothing better for killing creativity and imagination.
I always had an awful lot going on in my head, always telling myself stories, very vivid imagination.
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
I wanted to inspire every little girl who wants to be a dancer to fire their imagination about the joys of being on the stage.
I'm not driven. I love writing. My imagination is always working. I write when I have time, and life allows me the time.
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.
I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep, and those play out even more in my dreams.
I love roles that don't really have a template or a paradigm and force me to create using my own imagination... that really, really turns me on.
Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.
I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom.
You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
My imagination is a twisted place.
One thinks of toys and play as an area of great novelty and potentiality where all sorts of responses can be developed. The fact that adults are allowing their imaginations to have activity through toy kinds of objects is a further reflection of the belief in the imagination of the adult mind.
St. Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council because he understood, as no Holy Father had in a long time, religion spoke to and found its language and symbols - its entire sense of the sacramental nature of existence - in the imagination that reveals not just the penalties of living, but the wonder and awe of our existence.
I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.
The wonderful thing is, imagination is universal all over the world, no matter what the language is.
I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.
Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.
Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.
I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can.
