I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

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

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

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

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.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

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 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.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

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.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

I wasn’t a kid growing up thinking, ‚One day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech.‘ That wasn’t on my mind.

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.

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.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

I didn’t play with other children.

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.

One thing about ‚Star Wars‘ that I’m really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That’s why I like the ‚Star Wars‘ toys.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

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

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

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

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

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

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

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‚feeling‘ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.