Imaginative Quotes - Page 16

• To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

  Robert E. Sherwood

  Liars, Lying, Writing

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• A gathering of Democrats is more sweaty, disorderly, offhand, and rowdy than a gathering of Republicans; it is also likely to be more cheerful, imaginative, tolerant of dissent, and skillful at the game of give-and-take. A gathering of Republicans is more respectable, sober, purposeful, and businesslike than a gathering of Democrats; it is also likely to be more self-righteous, pompous, cut-and-dried, and just plain boring.

  Clinton Rossiter

  Cutting, Self, Games

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• The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive. When you hear a noise at night, instantly you imagine its cause. The sound of a train whistle conjures up the whole station. The eye can perceive only what is presented to it.

  Robert Bresson

  Eye, Night, Profound

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• I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

  Jonathan Demme

  Strong, Real, Feelings

  Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 1998.

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• You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

  Boris Johnson

  Country, Jet Engines, Hands

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• The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

  Susan Sontag

  Worst Case Scenario, Needs, Taste

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• Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Years, Needs, World

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• There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

  David Whyte

  Fierce, Lyrical, Aspect

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• What a rare joy it is to linger in the lucid, transcendent worlds of Jennifer Maier's poems. In taut, precise language and lapidary images, Now, Now explores myriad pathways of connection, the ways desire, longing, and imaginative possibility brush up against the everyday, revealing a keen, fiercely compassionate intelligence-a sensibility so finely attuned and so clearly in love with the world that you would follow it almost anywhere.

  Rick Hilles

  Joy, Everyday, Desire

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• Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Exercise, Fiction, May

  Marilynne Robinson (2012). “When I Was A Child I Read Books”, p.19, Hachette UK

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• [The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection ... If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [ Dichter ], but never a perfected, a truly great man.

  Karl Marx

  Mean, Men, Careers

  "Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation", 1835.

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• Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Mind, Milton

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1856). “The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions”, p.202

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• I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.

  Bill Nighy

  Technology, Thinking, Looks

  Source: collider.com

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• The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.

  Henry James

  Office, Mind, Criticism

  Henry James (1969). “Notes on Novelists: With Some Other Notes”, p.315, Biblo & Tannen Publishers

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• We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.

  Walter Pater

  Routine Work, Years, Desire

  Walter Pater (2006). “Marius the Epicurean: Easyread Large Edition”, p.233, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

  Jonathan Raban

  Unique, Assessment, Self

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.181, Pan Macmillan

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• A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Fall, Magic, Landscape

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• On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ...The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Children, Block, Creativity

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• With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement.

  Kwame Dawes

  Book, Writing, America

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• Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's The Wicked + The Divine is a warp into the middle of a wildly imaginative mythology and I'm itching to read more.

  Rick Remender

  Wicked, Divine, Jamie

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• Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Memories, Wind, Illusion

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character: And Other Essays on Writing”

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• Imaginative compassion for that which is other than myself is a constant artistic and ethical discipline.

  Shaun McNiff

  Compassion, Discipline, Artistic

  Shaun McNiff (1992). “Art as Medicine”, p.41, Shambhala Publications

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• How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

  Isaac Asimov

  Art, Two, People

  "The Roving Mind". Book by Isaac Asimov. Chapter 25, 1983.

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• I guess I've done a couple of boys-y movies and on the whole you get bracketed into things you've just done, so it was an imaginative surprise from my Disney family to pull me out of the hat, as it were in Cinderella.

  Kenneth Branagh

  Couple, Boys, Done

  "Kenneth Branagh Talks Updating ‘Cinderella’ and Working With Disney". Interview with Kara Warner, screenrant.com. March 12, 2015.

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• You know, and I know, the cause of this accident. It is due to the adventurous, pioneering spirit of our race. It has been like in the past, it is like that in the present, and I hope it will be in the future. Here is a great imaginative project, to build a machine with twice the speed and twice the height of any existing machine in the world. We all went into it with our eyes wide open. We were conscious of the dangers that were lurking in the unknown. We did not know what fate was going to hold out for us in the future.

  John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara

  Eye, Fate, Past

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