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

From the boys‘ point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

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

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

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.‘

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

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.

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

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I have worked hard since my childhood and worked as a labourer. I put my mind and heart into it.

But ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

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.

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

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.

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

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

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

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

I was called ‚Dumbo,‘ like the elephant, as a child because I couldn’t understand things at school.

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.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

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

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

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.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

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

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

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.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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