What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid.

Imagination creates reality.

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

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.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

Paris presents one incessant round of amusement & dissipation but very little, I believe - even for its inhabitants of that society - which interests the heart. Every day, you may see something new, magnificent & beautiful; every night, you may see a spectacle which astonishes & enchants the imagination.

Ideas control the world.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.

One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they've created these amazing churches.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination.

People who don't see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are lairs and fools.

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child's imagination.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

I've done a lot of bad things. Use your imagination.

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.

In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.

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.

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

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.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch.

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.

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.

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.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.

I still find it quite easy to find my way into a child's imagination. We're all Peter Pan ourselves in some respects. Everybody should keep some grip on childhood, even as a grownup.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

You have to have an unlimited imagination, an unlimited restraint on your inhibition when you're working. You have to even dare to fail, even in a scene, whatever it is.

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

I use so much of myself in everything I do. I think every actor does because you have no one else to go to but yourself and your own imagination.

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.

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.

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.