Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Simone Weil

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Simone Weil

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
Van Morrison

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Tom Robbins

Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.
Orison Swett Marden

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Edgar Degas

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

But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.
Karl Lagerfeld

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.
Baruch Spinoza

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

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

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.
Karl Kraus

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
Karl Kraus

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
Maxwell Maltz

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Henry James

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.
S. E. Hinton

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
Sam Levenson

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.
Stephen Sondheim

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
Vivien Leigh