Every business needs to get out of their own mindset and into the aspirational mindsets of their customers and clients and create services and products that are beyond their customers’ imagination but will be what they ‘gotta have’ in the future.
In film, if you’ve got to do a scene in a swimming pool, you do a scene in a swimming pool. If you’ve got to blow up a car, you blow up a car. In theater, you can’t do that, and therefore, you have the opportunity to engage the audience’s imagination in a way that’s rich.
You can’t make money without selling something real. You can’t make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can’t have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination – very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted.
It’s hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn’t start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.
Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it’s discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I’m at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy – you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can’t conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.
I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I’m like, ‘What do you mean he’s dead?’ We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.
When you gaze at stars and think about planets, the places it takes your imagination are amazing! You look up the sky, and you know the stars have always been here; they were referenced in biblical times and have always been present. They are somewhere up there in the future, and they guide you; they make you feel safe.
In schools giving students a full education, not to create great artists but about the right to have full expression and imagination and creativity, along with an acknowledgement that everybody learns differently. You try and you fail and you try again. All those skills are useful in the workplace, too.
To make extra money, my parents would sell eggs and chickens. I was very little. I remember a chicken’s head being chopped off with the chicken running around. I wasn’t sure if my imagination was running away with me or if it really happened. It really happened.
It’s easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That’s really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that’s a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.
Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.
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.
When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.
The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.
The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.
Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.
Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they’ll find. That’s the adventure.
When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before.
No, no, I don’t watch football. The last time I tried watching was the last Super Bowl. The problem I have is, you know, the graphic nature of my imagination; when I watch and see them meeting head onto head, helmet onto helmet, what flashes through my mind is what’s going on in their brains. It’s like torture to me.
If I feel like I haven’t really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that’s when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn’t do it in a journalistic context, because then you’re just fabricating, and that’s crazy.
I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every ‘Harry Potter’ book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.
