c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
— George Santayana
My proudest moment was probably when my oldest boy finished law school and went on to become an FBI agent. It was just beyond my imagination that - with my background - my own son would become an FBI agent.
— Frank Abagnale
I've proven I'm courageous. I'm gutsier than anybody; I've got a better imagination than anybody; I'm essentially more creative than any other actor I know, and I've proven I take risks. I don't think I need to prove anything to myself any more.
— Michael Keaton
To make extra money, my parents would sell eggs and chickens. I was very little. I remember a chicken's head being chopped off with the chicken running around. I wasn't sure if my imagination was running away with me or if it really happened. It really happened.
— Michael Keaton
Anything I did with the WWE was not therapeutic by any stretch of the imagination. The reality is that nobody's going to tell you that, because they have an umbilical cord hooked to Vince McMahon. I, ladies and gentlemen, do not.
— Bill Goldberg
The new age of terrorism isn't on the battlefield: it's in your own backyard. Whether it's at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn't have to happen in a military installation by any stretch of the imagination.
— Bill Goldberg
Whether it's at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn't have to happen in a military installation by any stretch of the imagination.
— Bill Goldberg
I didn't choose Goldberg because I wanted to be the flagship for the Jewish movement, not by any stretch of the imagination. I chose Goldberg because no one else can own it.
— Bill Goldberg
It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.
— Robin Wright
Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.
— Camille Paglia
Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination.
— Judy Blume
For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
— Joshua Bell
Edgy is fine - I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination - but what's wrong with a good ol' belly laugh? I miss that.
— Carol Burnett
I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.
— Michio Kaku
I don't want to go on much longer, really. I think that would suggest a lack of imagination. A certain lack of dignity also.
— Morrissey
Nobody would know it to look at me, but the movies I liked as a kid were musicals - 'All That Jazz,' 'Hair,' 'Fame,' 'Annie,' all that stuff - that's where my little youthful imagination was.
— Juliette Lewis
I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.
— Francis Ford Coppola
It takes no imagination to live within your means.
— Francis Ford Coppola
I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role.
— John Hurt
Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.
— John Hurt
I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.
— Sheryl Sandberg
The Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization but is constructed on the basis of reality.
— Rudolf Steiner
Sometimes when you've got too much money you lose your imagination.
— Paloma Faith
The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.
— Bryant H. McGill
A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.
— Michael Pena
I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.
— Michael Pena
For me, when I do my best acting, it's mainly imagination. Then I really have a lot of fun with it.
— Michael Pena
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
— Emile M. Cioran
Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.
— Christina Ricci
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
— Seamus Heaney
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
— Seamus Heaney
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
— Edmund White
I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination.
— Alan Moore
Well, I'm not a method actress by any stretch of the imagination so the best thing that I can do is be as real as possible and find whatever commonality in that character that I can see myself.
— Rashida Jones
Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it's transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.
— Steve Carell
Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it's always been there. It's been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had.
— Janet Jackson
I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid.
— Janet Jackson
Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
— Franz Kafka
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
— Pete Hamill
I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker.
— Lee Daniels
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.
— Darcey Bussell
I want everyone to put their views forward, every union branch, every party branch, so we develop organically the strengths we all have, the imagination we all have.
— Jeremy Corbyn
The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.
— Alex Guarnaschelli
What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
— Wynton Marsalis
When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.
— Steve Erickson
The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.
— Melvyn Bragg
As an actor, whether I'm playing Othello on stage or David Estes on 'Homeland,' that ability to give into your imagination is something that I enjoy.
— David Harewood
Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
— John Darnielle
I tend to be really spacey, but I don't think it's because I'm unintelligent - it's just my imagination and a little bit of ADD.
— Jenny Slate
My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way.
— Steve Blank
As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.
— Siri Hustvedt
I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.
— Kristen Stewart
Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.
— Henry Miller
You know what's better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.
— Ryan Holiday
A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.
— Ravi Subramanian
When James Bond presses the watch and the car explodes, the writer doesn't go into the science of it. One should leave it to the leap of faith. I have tried to explain as much as possible, and what I can't, I have left it to people's imagination.
— Ravi Subramanian
You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.
— James Altucher
Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.
— Jonathan Kozol
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
— W. Somerset Maugham
You know when you're a child and your imagination is limitless and you really believe in magic? I thought I had super powers.
— Michelle Phan
My production style is all about imagination. I want my audience to use their imagination when they watch my videos. My goal is for my voice to be that little hope of encouragement in your head when you walk out your door.
— Michelle Phan
Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination.
— Barry Ritholtz
I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.
— George R. R. Martin
To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.
— Jay Parini
It's an imaginative thing we do; it's about immersing oneself in one's imagination. If you're a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies.
— Rupert Friend
I'm a big fan of imagination. I think it's the strongest tool we have, and there are some things that you just can't practice.
— Rupert Friend
I would love to do a western. I would love to play an explorer. That is always something that has really captured my imagination since I was a kid, like James Cook or Magellan or Earnest Shackleton.
— John C. Reilly
I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination.
— Rachel Nichols
The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.
— Jonathan Sacks
In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.
— Rick Perlstein
Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.
— Edmund Phelps
The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.
— Sarah Parcak
A-POC unleashes the freedom of imagination. It's for people who are curious, who have inner energy - the energy of life and living.
— Issey Miyake
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
— Amy Tan
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.
— Joseph Addison
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.
— Haruki Murakami
It's hard to see yourself as a princess because it involves a huge leap of the imagination and sort of requires you to believe you can be that, which is a scary, weird thing.
— Lily James
I'm a light sleeper. I've never been one of those people who can put their head down and suddenly everything disappears. Nighttime is the time I get most scared, anxious or worried. In those darker moments before waking or sleeping is when I feel most, I don't know, I can turn on myself, and my imagination can take me dark places.
— Florence Welch
To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
— Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
— John le Carre
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
— John le Carre
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.
— Joel Kinnaman
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
I seriously believed that my last hour was approaching, and yet, so strange is imagination, all I thought of was some childish hypothesis or other. In such circumstances, you do not choose your own thoughts. They overcome you.
— Jules Verne
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.
— Billy Collins
Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
— Billy Collins
I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.
— Billy Collins
It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
— Tom Wolfe
Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
— Al Gore
Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.
— Christian Bale
Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.
— Hanya Yanagihara
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
— Mark Haddon
I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'
— Becky G
The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
— Ethan Canin
I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
— Ethan Canin
All my life I've had the privilege to make my living with my imagination, and the most important thing has been to see my creative life grow. I was educated to do that and have lived accordingly.
— Tommy Lee Jones
Mr. Bergman had a great imagination and saw the possibilities within every one of his actors, and he gave us great challenges. It was very inspiring.
— Max von Sydow
There are casting directors with lots of imagination, but also some with not as much imagination.
— Max von Sydow
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I had a good imagination and I still have one a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away.
— Laura Linney
The most important innovators often don't need any technologies - just imagination and acute sensitivity to people's needs.
— Geoff Mulgan
India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days.
— Vanessa Hudgens
Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.
— Robert J. Sawyer
You think in a different way when you don't have any money. The joy of poverty is that you use your imagination to come up with stuff.
— Amy Sedaris
It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.
— Jack Nicholson
John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.
— Douglas Brinkley
If there is a book that the script came from you have to read it, you have to see what you can get out of it: mood, back story and things that may not even be in the film. They kick off your imagination and broaden the character, I think.
— Miranda Otto
My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead.
— Nicole Kidman
When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
— Ellen Key
There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.
— Eddie Marsan
I don't think most books can be justifiably translated on screen. The film versions can't convey the right emotion, fuel your imagination or allow you to visualise every line the way books do.
— Sonam Kapoor
My mom would always read a book to me at night from when I was three. Now, I can't go to sleep without reading a book. At the same time, once I read, it's difficult for me to go to sleep, as I have an overactive imagination and I start thinking.
— Sonam Kapoor
I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.
— Eddie Marsan
I have a very strong imagination and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant.
— James Gunn
I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
— John Irving
I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
— J. G. Ballard
There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
— J. G. Ballard
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.
— J. G. Ballard
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
— J. G. Ballard
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
— Jill Lepore
I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.
— Joshua Oppenheimer
Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war.
— Ahmed Zewail
Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.
— Bryan Cranston
'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.
— Nathan Fillion
I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. Actually, I always wanted to be in a comic book. I watched cartoons when I was a kid, too, and both comics and cartoons lit fire in my imagination. This realm holds a lot of interest for me, a lot of passion for me. So to be comic-ized, yeah, that's cool.
— Nathan Fillion
There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
— Idris Elba
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.
— Orhan Pamuk
Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy.
— Orhan Pamuk
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
— Thomas Huxley
It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
— Damien Hirst
Visualization - it's been huge for me. Your mind doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. You can't always practice perfectly - my fingers will play a little bit out of tune, or my dance moves might not be as sharp - but in my mind, I can practice perfectly.
— Lindsey Stirling
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
— Georg C. Lichtenberg
Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.
— LL Cool J
I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.
— Rick Riordan
I think imagination is a crazy thing, and that's what makes the world go around.
— Shahid Khan
New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.
— Margo Jefferson
There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.
— Matt Haig
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
— Barbara Kingsolver
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
— Sue Monk Kidd
I may have been sexy, but I was covered up total. There was something left to the imagination.
— Suzi Quatro
Most of the songs I write are just very directly from my life. I don't have a big imagination. Whenever I tried to write from fantasy, it comes out sounding really fake.
— Rivers Cuomo
Everything you do on set is directly related to your imagination when you read the script for the first time.
— Ewan McGregor
I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.
— Courteney Cox
Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.
— David Hume
It's what you don't see that keeps you on the edge of your seat in any kind of film - leave it to the imagination of the viewer.
— Christopher Lee
Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.
— Joaquin Phoenix
I guess I'm a very keen observer, and I'd like to think I have a good imagination.
— Eric Bana
I feel like 'Amelie' is very much an extension of me. She's a contemporary woman who sees the world through her imagination.
— Phillipa Soo
Everything is creative. It's all relative to me. No matter what, you've gotta use your imagination, use your senses.
— Action Bronson
Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.
— Simon McBurney
I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes.
— Simon McBurney
I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.
— Anna Deavere Smith
Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.
— Terry Wogan
I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.
— Maria Semple
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
— Danny Boyle
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
— Danny Boyle
The aspect of kind of living in your imagination and creating a more romantic vision of the world than the reality that you're given - that's definitely something I can sort of relate to.
— Alden Ehrenreich
With any kind of sci-fi, the imagination continues, and the world exists, and you create that in your own mind, and it lives in you.
— Scott Bakula
My mother always cultivated my imagination from the time I was very little.
— Alden Ehrenreich
If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination.
— Hedy Lamarr
I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years.
— Robert Englund
I started track and field when I was 12 and didn't get to an Olympic Games until I was nearly 23. By any stretch of the imagination that's a very long apprenticeship.
— Sebastian Coe
A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.
— Charles M. Schwab
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
— Julian Assange
Once you've got a child to the point that they've discovered books, they're safe. There's a world of the imagination that when they're hurt or upset, they can move into, and it is wonderful.
— John Rhys-Davies
I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world.
— Robert Carlyle
We didn't have all the distractions that young people have today. We didn't have these incredible computer games and social networks to engage with. I understand that. But once young readers do discover reading, when they discover a book which they fall in love with, it really unleashes something new in their imagination.
— Mark Billingham
A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.
— Mark Billingham
When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.
— Daniel Boulud
The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
— John Berger
You get your heart stomped by the opposite sex, and you're hurting so badly that you write 'Sometimes When We Touch.' But then what happens when you've been married for 25 years? You can't rely on those emotional male-female roller coasters. You have to start using your imagination and the powers of empathy more.
— Dan Hill
The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk.
— Rose George
Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination's curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.
— Andrew Solomon
I have a very vivid imagination.
— Janice Dickinson
You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.
— Rita Dove
Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
— Alfred North Whitehead
I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.
— James Salter
I have never been able to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes - the stories in my head have always been so much more entertaining. Only books could pull me out of my own imagination, and then it was only to plunge me into someone else's.
— W. Bruce Cameron
For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
— Manuel Puig
It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
Possessing a healthy imagination is a necessary ingredient for creativity.
— Steve Vai
There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
— Antony Beevor
I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
— Vikram Seth
I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.
— Sam Taylor-Wood
I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.
— Colm Toibin
I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.
— Shigeru Miyamoto
Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.
— Ralph Fiennes
I find Godzilla exciting because he/she/it comes from the sea. It's entirely plausible that it could be real. Yes it is! It doesn't take a huge stretch in the imagination to imagine that something may be living at the deepest depths of one of our oceans.
— Rhys Darby
Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.
— Ron Perlman
The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.
— Chris Van Allsburg
The general effect of viewing 'Jumanji' is thrilling. I was able to see on film a thing that at one point had only existed in my imagination. I got to see the images from my book come alive.
— Chris Van Allsburg
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
— Milan Kundera
I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch.
— Chris Hemsworth
When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.
— Malorie Blackman
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
— Terry Eagleton
I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination.
— Patty Duke
When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.
— Daniel Tammet
If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.
— Daniel Tammet
I think most of the time you can make something happen, and it's about not letting your imagination be limited by that.
— Jane Goldman
Imagination is Reality Lite - a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.
— Paul Bloom
Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.
— Paul Bloom
I box two to three times a week. I don't like going to the gym because it's boring. I really like boxing because you have to combine concentration and imagination. I feel like I'm actually learning something that's useful.
— Stephanie Sigman
People who don't see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are lairs and fools.
— Bodhidharma
Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination.
— Tim Robbins
I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?
— Jane Campion
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.
— Jane Campion
I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary, I am the organizer, I am the maid, and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling.
— Jane Campion
God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.
— Erwin McManus
You can have 10 bucks to 10 million bucks and if you got a crew, imagination and a lot of people willing to turn in some work next to nothing, you going to have a feature. But you can't get beyond how expensive marketing the movie is, it's so crushing.
— Kevin Smith
As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.
— John Hawkes
For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.
— John Banville
The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
— Van Morrison
Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.
— Vernon Howard
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
— Karl Kraus
There's no reason for your imagination to be fettered by money.
— Kevin McCloud
I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination.
— Sally Mann
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.
— Geraldine Brooks
My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
— Barbara Corcoran
Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.
— Michelle Paver
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
— Wislawa Szymborska
Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
— Ian Mcewan
The goal of 'Data Detectives' is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.
— Rick Smolan
For a 12-year-old with a hyperactive imagination who liked to dream of dreary gothic castles, suburban Florida felt a little stifling.
— Ransom Riggs
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
— Richard Russo
All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination.
— Marc Guggenheim
Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances.
— Sam Worthington
To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.
— Julia Glass
As a little girl, my destiny was stamped onto the canvas of my imagination at 5 years old. I was watching soaps with my grandmother... The most gorgeous black women I had ever seen in my life came out, and I knew that that is what I wanted to do - be fabulous and black and on TV.
— Niecy Nash
When you are a people's movement, you have one thing. Your only asset is people. And you have to deal with real people. Not the people of your imagination. Not the people you wish people would be. But people as they exist actually out there in the real world.
— Norman Finkelstein
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's 'Courant', it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.
— Eric Alterman
I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.
— Jacki Weaver
There's something magical about a home run. It almost violates the space of the stadium. It's a game of the imagination in some ways. Baseball.
— Alex Gibney
Radio listeners often have a very fertile imagination when it comes to body shape.
— Tamsin Greig
I believed in myself. I never imagined myself as just an ordinary player.
— Imran Khan
If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.
— Bela Lugosi
I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one.
— Mike Krzyzewski
Imagination has a great deal to do with winning.
— Mike Krzyzewski
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'
— Cynthia Ozick
I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.
— Cynthia Ozick
My children have been all over the world, and I think it's so good for them: expanding their horizons and imagination and seeing how other people live.
— Keeley Hawes
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
— Peter Ackroyd
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
— Peter Ackroyd
When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he'd be pleased.
— Anthony Browne
Inspiring passion in children for books, and the world of imagination and creativity fuelled by them, is a fundamental reason for why the Children's Laureate post exists.
— Anthony Browne
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
— Anthony Browne
There's so much more that I want to do. Of course it's great what has happened so far: Ultra, Coachella, EDC. But still, production-wise and show-wise, I'd love to play a show at Madison Square Garden. Stuff like that is beyond my imagination.
— Martin Garrix
My daughter has a vivid imagination, and so does my son.
— Nicole Ari Parker
Every parent knows this moment in a child's age when he or she needs your attention in a very specific way because it's the beginning and ending of the early life of imagination. It's such a responsibility.
— Nicole Ari Parker
I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.
— Henning Mankell
Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.
— Gary Weiss